Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Helen Rowland

I have learned by experience that no man’s character can be eventually injured but by his own acts.

Character | Experience | Man |

Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist

As a man grows older, he values the voice of experience more and the voice of prophecy less. He finds more of life's wealth in the common pleasures - home, health, children. He thinks more about worth of men and less about their wealth. He boasts less and boosts more. He hurries less, and usually makes more progress. He esteems the friendship of God a little higher.

Character | Children | Experience | God | Health | Life | Life | Little | Man | Men | Progress | Prophecy | Wealth | Worth | Friendship | God |

Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways.

Body | Character | Earth | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul |

Noah benShea

Life is not always wonderful, but it is an experience filled with wonder.

Character | Experience | Life | Life | Wonder |

Samuel Smiles

Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom.

Character | Experience | Good | Sense | Wisdom |

O. Carl Simonton

The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be.

Character | Children | Experience | Health | Land | Love | Men | Self | Wisdom |

Jeremy Taylor

It is a little learning, and but a little, which makes men conclude hastily. Experience and humility teach modesty and fear.

Character | Experience | Fear | Humility | Learning | Little | Men | Modesty | Teach |

H. W. Andrews

While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision.

Action | Better | Consideration | Courage | Decision | Experience | Failure | Fear | Habit | Judgment | Man | Mind | Nothing | Position | Question | Responsibility | Right | Time | Will | Wisdom | Failure |

Yitzchok Waldshein

Regardless of where a person actually is physically, he is really where his thoughts are. A person constantly has a choice to think elevated and uplifting thoughts or negative, self-destructive thoughts. How old you feel is greatly dependent on your attitude about yourself. Elderly people can increase their vitality and vigor by considering themselves young.

Character | Choice | People | Self | Old | Think |

Sherwood Anderson

I have sometimes a queer mystical feeling as regards the attitude of people in general. Just as there are physical diseases, so there are diseases of feelings. In a little town like this I feel that on some days everyone goes about hating everyone else. Then something happens and a good feeling comes back. I think the whole of mankind must be like that.

Feelings | Good | Little | Mankind | Mystical | People | Wisdom | Think |

John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey

This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself.

Experience | Life | Life | Man | Suffering | Will | Wisdom | Learn |

William L. Abbott

Develop the art of friendliness. One can experience a variety of emotions staying home and reading or watching television; one will be alive but hardly living. Most of the meaningful aspects of life are closely associated with people. Even the dictionary definition of life involves people.

Art | Emotions | Experience | Life | Life | People | Reading | Television | Will | Wisdom | Art |

Visvanatha Chakravarti, fully Visvanatha Chakravarti Thakura

The experience of beauty is pure, self-manifested, compounded equally of joy and consciousness, free from admixture of any other perception, the very twin brother of mystical experience, and the very life of it is supersensous wonder... It is enjoyed by those who are competent thereto, in identity, just as the form of God is itself the joy with which it is recognized.

Beauty | Character | Consciousness | Experience | God | Joy | Life | Life | Mystical | Perception | Self | Wonder | Beauty | God |

Mark Van Doren

Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.

Character | Experience | Wisdom | Words |

Chayim Efrayim Zaichyk

If you have a positive attitude towards the events of your life, even though to an outside observer your life might seem full of suffering, you nevertheless will live a happy life. What to others might seem misfortunes, you will view as opportunities for spiritual growth.

Character | Events | Growth | Happy | Life | Life | Suffering | Will |