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

George Matthew Adams

It's what each of us sows, and how, that gives to us character and prestige. Seeds of kindness, goodwill, and human understanding, planted in fertile soil, spring up into deathless friendships, big deeds of worth, and a memory that will not soon fade out. We are all sowers of seeds - and let us never forget it!

Character | Deeds | Kindness | Memory | Understanding | Will | Worth | Deeds |

Frederick Evan Crane

To make a man happy, fill his hands with work, his heart with affection, his mind with purpose, his memory with useful knowledge, his future with hope, and his stomach with food. The devil never enters a man except one of these rooms be vacant.

Character | Devil | Future | Happy | Heart | Hope | Knowledge | Man | Memory | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Work |

Francis Alexander Durivage

They teach us to remember; why do not they teach us to forget? There is not a man living who has not, some time in his life, admitted that memory was as much of a curse as a blessing.

Character | Life | Life | Man | Memory | Teach | Time |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

Action | Character | Good | Memory | Teacher |

Charles Montagu Halifax, 1st Earl of Halifax, Lord Halifax

The memory and conscience never did, nor never will, agree about forgiving injuries.

Character | Conscience | Memory | Will |

William Harvey

There is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses; all knowledge, at all events, is examined by these, approved by them, and finally presents itself to us firmly grounded upon some preexisting knowledge which we possessed: because without memory there is no experience, which is nothing else than reiterated memory; in like manner memory cannot exist without endurance of the things perceived, and the thing perceived cannot remain where it has never been.

Character | Endurance | Events | Experience | Knowledge | Memory | Nothing |

Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

The memory of past favors, is like a rainbow, bright, vivid, and beautiful, but it soon fades away. The memory of injuries is engraved on the heart, and remains forever.

Character | Heart | Memory | Past |

David Hume

Custom is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared I the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.

Action | Character | Custom | Ends | Events | Experience | Future | Influence | Life | Life | Means | Memory | Past | Present | Speculation |

Phyllis Huffman

I found death to be a simple shift in consciousness. It was painless, instantaneous and nothing to be feared. In fact, it felt more natural not to breath than to breathe. It was wonderful not to 'wear' a body. I had complete mobility, perfect memory and knowledge. I was free! I found no fear in dying. The fear came for me when I realized that I was still alive, and I didn't 'stay dead'.You don't lose your cravings or addictions in dying, but I found that you do lose your ability to satisfy them. The opportunities that existed before are no more. Whatever are your attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, ideas, feelings, expectations or apprehensions...that's what you'll wear and that's what you'll be. They become your body and your world. No more games. No more secrets. No more cover-up. You become what you really are! We are in a condition of our own creation. When we die we reap our own harvest.

Ability | Body | Character | Consciousness | Death | Fear | Feelings | Ideas | Knowledge | Memory | Nothing | World |

Jean Baptiste Massillon

Gratitude is the memory of the heart.

Character | Gratitude | Heart | Memory |

Charles B. Newcomb

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

Character | Literature | Memory | Mind |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Nothing so deeply imprints anything in our memory as the desire to forget it.

Character | Desire | Memory | Nothing |

Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

A teacher should give his pupil opportunity for independent practice without suggestions from himself, and thus set upon him the stamp of indelible memory in its purest form.

Character | Memory | Opportunity | Practice | Teacher |

Plotinus NULL

Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and clearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering - Lethe stream may be understood in this sense - and memory is a fact of the soul.

Body | Cause | Character | Forgetfulness | Memory | Sense | Soul | Will |