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

Samuel Gompers

The United States of America wants nothing whatever out of this war. You cannot give us anything that we would take. What we want is not only for us to live in peace and unafraid for our freedom, but to know that the peoples of the nationalities of the world have an opportunity in the arts of peace, working out their destinies and in the common cause vying with each other to bring about the great, the true ideal of internationalism and human brotherhood.

Ideas | Means |

Sam Walton, fully Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton

I remember one time I didn’t want to spend any money on motels so we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor of one of our guys’ houses. His furniture hadn’t gotten there yet.

Ideas | Will |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

Ideas | World |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake.

Ideas | Little | Mind | Need | Progress | Will | Worry |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

Ideas |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

For the greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only loveable because they are changing.

Faith | God | Ideas | Nature | Openness | God |

Shvetashvatara Upanishad

The Supreme Lord is higher than Virat, beyond Hiranyagarbha. He is vast and is hidden in the bodies of all living beings. By knowing Him who alone pervades the universe, men become immortal.

Enjoyment | Ideas | Knowledge | Lord |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall.

Ideas | Light | Will |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

Ideas | Necessity | Need |

Simone Weil

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive .

Ideas | Intelligence | Man | Public | Reason | Success | Unity |

Simone Weil

Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

Ideas | Thought | Wrong | Thought |

Simone Weil

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

Absolute | Abstract | Age | Capitalism | Democracy | Ideas | Means | Play | Principles | Sacrifice | Science | Time | Universe | Words |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.

Absolute | Abstract | Childhood | Contempt | Desire | Fighting | Ideas | Nothing | Order | Paradise | Reality | Suffering | World |

Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered: Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of s gigantic hound!

Human race | Ideas | Nature | Power | Race | Speech | World |

Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention? To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. The dog did nothing in the night-time. That was the curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Ideas | Knowledge |

Stephan Jay Gould

I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.

Ideas | Memory | Metaphysics | Organic |

Stephan Jay Gould

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.

Argument | Assertion | Events | History | Ideas | Miracles | Need | Order | Science | Story |

Stephan Jay Gould

I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.

Ideas | Imagination | Laughter | Men | Respect | Worth | Respect | Understand |

Stephan Jay Gould

No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

Ideas | Nature | Observation | Science | Thought | Worth | Thought |

Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

Beginning | Bible | Character | Enough | Events | Genius | Happy | Ideas | Inconsistency | Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Need | Reading | Spirit | Style | Thought | Understanding | Will | Woman | Bible | Old | Thought |