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

Thomas Arnold

As I believe the English universities are the best places in the world for those who can profit by them, so I think for the idle and self-indulgent they are about the very worst.

Boys | Enough | Growth | Hope | Little | Nothing | Present | Rest | Sin | World | Youth | Youth | Old |

Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

As a child walking over a slippery and dangerous path cries out, "Father, I am falling!" and has but a moment to catch his father's hand, so every believer sees hours when only the hand of Jesus comes between him and the abysses of destruction.

Blessings | Church | God | Growth | Need | Service | Strength | Will | God |

Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

The firmament of the Bible is ablaze with answers to prayer.

Bible | Enough | Growth | Life | Life | Little | Lord | Parables | Time | Vision | Bible |

Thomas Chalmers

The only popularity worth aspiring after is a peaceful popularity—the popularity of the heart—the popularity that is won in the bosom of families and at the side of death-beds. There is another, a high and a far-sounding popularity, which is indeed a most worthless article, felt by all who have it most to be greatly more oppressive than gratifying,—a popularity of stare, and pressure, and animal heat, and a whole tribe of other annoyances which it brings around the person of its unfortunate victim,—a popularity which rifles home of its sweets, and by elevating a man above his fellows places him in a region of desolation, where the intimacies of human fellowship are unfelt, and where he stands a conspicuous mark for the shafts of malice, and envy, and detraction,—a popularity which, with its head among storms, and its feet on the treacherous quicksands, has nothing to lull the agonies of its tottering existence but the hosannahs of a drivelling generation.

Achievement | Education | Future | Habit | Law | Man | Righteousness | Time | Virtue | Virtue |

Thomas Jefferson

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Children | Education | Life | Life | Wealth |

Thomas Jefferson

Above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, and consider every act of this kind, as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties and increase your worth.

Education | Good | Hope | People | Security | Sense | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

Education | Life | Life | Nothing |

Thomas Jefferson

If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air... We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of 'a public debt being a public blessing,' and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper.

Education | Hope | Man |

Thomas Jefferson

A great deal of love given to a few is better than a little to many.

Birth | Government | Growth | Wise | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

Education | Energy | Giving | Government | Peace | Will | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

Blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.

Discussion | Disease | Education | Enthusiasm |

Thomas Jefferson

I own it to be my opinion, that good will arise from the destruction of our credit. I see nothing else which can restrain our disposition to luxury, and to the change of those manners which alone can preserve republican government. As it is impossible to prevent credit, the best way would be to cure its ill effects by giving an instantaneous recovery to the creditor. This would be reducing purchases on credit to purchases for ready money. A man would then see a prison painted on everything he wished, but had not ready money to pay for.

Authority | Confidence | Doubt | Events | Government | Growth | Peace | People | Principles | Public | Safe | Time | Government | Crisis |

Thomas Jefferson

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he has known nothing but what has passed under his own eye.

Education | Grave | Learning |

Thomas Jefferson

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.

Better | Education | Feelings | Will | Child |

Thomas Jefferson

Is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy.

Better | Care | Duty | Education | Excitement | Father | Feelings | Force | Ideas | Life | Life | Motives | Opposition | Receive | Right | Sentiment | Society | Will | Society | Child | Parent |

Thomas Jefferson

No instance exists of a person’s writing two languages perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth.

Better | Birth | Body | Creed | Doctrine | Force | God | Growth | Gullibility | Man | Martyrs | Mind | Paradox | Unity | Will | God |

Thomas Jefferson

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Authority | Government | Growth | Peace | Principles | Safe | Time | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own. It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by answering questions of faith, which the laws have left between God and himself.

Birth | Education | Genius | Nature | Public | Regard | Rights | Sacred | Happiness |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

And then he'd rub his cheeks with cold cream because he'd just shaved and the tears stung.

Desire | Growth | Life | Life |

Thomas Kyd

As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there’s the torment, there’s the hell.

Bigotry | Education | Ignorance | Man | Politics | Power | Praise | Religion | Science | Thinking |