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

Gustavo Gutiérrez

God’s love is the reason for our creation, a free, gratuitous love, a love without limits... Our duty is to translate this love into acts of solidarity and commitment.

Character | Commitment | Duty | God | Love | Reason |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"A Farewell To Arms"; that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

Character | Fallacy | Men | Wisdom | Wise | Old |

Stephan Jay Gould

We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves - from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.

Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Sense | Wisdom |

Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald

Ninety percent of all human wisdom is the ability to mind your own business.

Ability | Business | Character | Mind | Wisdom |

Rollo C. Hester

In building a firm foundation for Success, here are a few stones to remember: The wisdom of preparation. The value of confidence. The worth of honesty. The privilege of working. The discipline of struggle. The magnetism of character. The radiance of health. The forcefulness of simplicity. The winsomeness of courtesy. The attractiveness of modesty. The inspiration of cleanliness. The satisfaction of serving. The power of suggestion. The buoyancy of enthusiasm. The advantage of initiative. The virtue of patience. The rewards of co-operation. The fruitfulness of perseverance. The sportsmanship of losing. The joy of winning.

Character | Cleanliness | Confidence | Courtesy | Discipline | Enthusiasm | Health | Honesty | Initiative | Inspiration | Joy | Modesty | Patience | Perseverance | Power | Simplicity | Struggle | Success | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Worth | Privilege | Value |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

We are all tatooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.

Character | Imagination | Man | Reason |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

Much of this world’s wisdom is still acquired by necromancy, by consulting the oracular dead.

Character | Wisdom | World |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

It is much easier to think right without doing right, than to do right without thinking right. Just thoughts may, and often do, fail of producing just deeds; but just deeds are sure to get just thoughts. The clearest understanding can do little in purifying an impure heart, the strongest little in straightening a crooked one. You cannot reason or talk an Augean stable into cleanliness. A single day's work would make more progress in such a task than a century's words.

Character | Cleanliness | Day | Deeds | Heart | Little | Progress | Reason | Right | Thinking | Understanding | Words | Work | Deeds | Think |

William James

What may be called “club-opinion” is one of the very strongest forces in life. The thief must not steal from other thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he pay no other debts in the world. The code of honor of fashionable society has throughout history been full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason for following either of which is that so we best serve one of our social selves.

Character | History | Honor | Life | Life | Opinion | Reason | Society | World | Society | Following |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

What we do depends in large measure upon what we think, and if what we do it evil, there is good empirical reason for supposing that our thought patterns are inadequate to material, mental or spiritual reality.

Character | Evil | Good | Reality | Reason | Thought | Thought |

Max Horkheimer

The contradiction between what is requested of man and what can be offered to him has become so striking, the ideology so thin, the discontents in civilization so great that they must be compensated through annihilation of those who do not conform, political enemies, Jews, asocial persons, the insane. The new order of fascism is reason revealing itself as unreason.

Character | Civilization | Contradiction | Man | Order | Reason |

David Hume

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

Character | Morality | Reason |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

It is virtue, to fly vice; and the highest wisdom to have lived free from folly.

Character | Folly | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

David Hume

Among the other excellencies of man, this is one, that he can form the image of perfection much beyond what he has experience of in himself, and is not limited in his conception of wisdom and virtue.

Character | Experience | Man | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

David Hume

Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion... Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Character | Impulse | Nothing | Office | Passion | Reason |

Edward Porter Humphrey

True wisdom is to know what is best worth knowing, and to do what is best worth doing.

Character | Knowing | Wisdom | Worth |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there’s a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great.

Character | Mind | Reason | Understanding | Will | Think |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Character | Ends | Justify | Means | Nature | Reason |

John-Roger & Peter McWilliams NULL

Courage, contrary to popular belief, is not the absence of fear. Courage is the wisdom to act in spite of fear.

Absence | Belief | Character | Courage | Fear | Wisdom |