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

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.

Awakening | Justice | Life | Life | Past | People | Right | Will | Worth |

Wallace Stevens

At the piano, scales, arpeggios and chords, the morning exercises, the afternoon's reading, the night's reflection, that's how to produce a virtuoso.

Sound |

W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade

As a single atom, man is an enigma: as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent: as a species, the offspring of necessity. The unity of the universe is a scientific fact. To assert that it is the operation of a single Mind is a conjecture based on analogy, and analogy may be a deceptive guide.

Destiny | Government | Man | Men | Order | Posterity | Theories | Government |

Walker Percy

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.

Consciousness | Discovery | Evolution | Knowing | Self | Discovery |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out — and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all “aliens”, the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia — that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!"

Change | Justice | Need | People | Struggle | System | Will | Crisis |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her - long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal.

Future | Life | Life | Man | Posterity | Sense | Tenderness | Will |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Beginning | Control | Era | Phenomena | Sacred | Thought | Old | Thought |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.

Absurd | Justice | Mind | People | Religion | Sense | Soul | Understanding | Will | Wrong |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

Laws enacted to help its citizens have also begun to scare them!

Beginning |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing, I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. I am the swathed figure in the hairdresser's shop taking up only so much space.

Action | Contempt | Harm | Men | Thought | Thought | Understand |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

Violence must be put down! against cruelty make a stand, ye who would make sure of the reward of Good Thought through Right, to whose company the holy man belongs. His dwelling place shall be in thy House, O Ahura.

Blessings | Soul |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Art | Experience | Man | Marriage | Mind | Sense | Woman | Art |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers.

Enemy | Good | Light | Principles | Respect | Respect |

Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

One man excels in eloquence, another in arms.

Life | Life |

Victor Hugo

A dogma is a dark chamber.

Commerce | Day | Diet | Fraternity | Men | Power | Torture | Will | Commerce | Think |

Vicki Robin

It is easier to tell our therapist about our sex life than it is to tell our accountant about our finances.

Competition | Computer | Effort | Freedom | Industry | Justice | Law | Life | Life | Little | Play | Right | Rights | Ruthlessness | Sense | Thinking | Time | Truth | War | Guilty |

Victor Cousin

We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake…the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

Absolute | Justice | Law |

Vicki Robin

Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.

Blame | Fault | Feelings | Little | Past | Race | Right | Shame | Story | Fault |

Victor Hugo

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Age | Antiquity | Criticism | Flattery | History | Justice | Knowledge | Men | Metaphysics | Modesty | Old age | Philosophy | Poetry | Public | Religion | Old |