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

John Welwood

Look at our present life circumstances, whatever they may be, as the raw material of our learning... We must stop regarding ourselves as victims of circumstances, and start to acknowledge that we are not here purely by accident. The master within is trying to help us wake up by confronting us with our current life situation, which contains all the lessons we need to learn in order to grow into more fully developed human beings.

Accident | Character | Circumstances | Learning | Life | Life | Need | Order | Present | Learn |

Esther Baldwin York

Whatever your work is, dignify it with your best thought and effort.

Character | Effort | Thought | Wisdom | Work | Thought |

John Winthrop

We must be knit together in this work as one man; we must entertain each other in brotherly affection; we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together; always having before our eyes our commission and community as members of the same body.

Body | Character | Commerce | Gentleness | Labor | Man | Meekness | Mourn | Patience | Work | Commerce |

George Matthew Adams

Encouragement is oxygen to the soul. Good work can never be expected from a worker without encouragement. No one ever climbed spiritual heights without it. No one ever lived without it.

Good | Soul | Wisdom | Work |

William Whewell

A man really looking onward to an immortal life, on whatever grounds, exhibits to us the human soul in an ennobled attitude.

Character | Life | Life | Man | Soul |

Zitkala-Sa, also Zitkala-Ša, missionary-given name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin NULL

The racial lines, which once were bitterly real, now serve nothing more than marking out a living mosaic of human beings.

Character | Nothing |

Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

Tomorrow comes to us untarnished by human living. No human eyes have seen it and no one can tell what it is going to be. The Chinese word for tomorrow (mingtien) means "bright day." There is the wisdom of sages and the rapture of the poets in that image.

Day | Means | Tomorrow | Wisdom |

John Anster, fully John Martin Anster

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.

Boldness | Genius | Magic | Mind | Power | Will | Wisdom | Work |

Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow

Religion is a hunger for beauty and love and glory. It is wonder and the mystery and majesty, passion and ecstasy. It is emotion as well as mind, feeling as well as knowing, the subjective as well as the objective. It is the heart soaring to heights the head alone will never know; the apprehension of meanings science alone will never find; the awareness of values ethics alone will never reveal. It is the human spirit yearning for, and finding, something infinitely greater than itself which it calls God.

Awareness | Beauty | Ecstasy | Ethics | Glory | God | Heart | Hunger | Knowing | Love | Mind | Mystery | Passion | Religion | Science | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Wonder | Beauty | Awareness |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: there is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; we must love one another or die.

Authority | Choice | Hunger | Love | Man | Wisdom |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all, ever since what might be call’d thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance to justify the ways of God to man... which is the foundation of moral America... to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism through Time.

Acceptance | Beauty | Belief | Character | Desire | Existence | Faith | God | Health | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Mystery | Nature | Object | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Beauty | God | Poem | Thought | Understand |

Franklin Pierce Adams, pen name F.P.A.

While the work or play is on, it is a lot of fun if while you are doing one you don't constantly feel that you ought to be doing the other.

Fun | Play | Wisdom | Work |

John Anderson

We do not, in fact, step out of the movement of things, ask ‘What am I to do’ and, having obtained an answer, step in again. All our actions, all our questionings and answerings, are part of the movement of things, and if we can work on things, things can work on us - if they can be our ‘vehicles’, we also can be vehicles; social and other forces can work through us.

Wisdom | Work |