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

Tyron Edwards

Piety and morality are but the same spirit differently manifested. Piety is religion with its face toward God; morality is religion with its face toward the world.

Character | God | Morality | Piety | Religion | Spirit | World |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus rise and increase.

Character | Important | Men | Morality | Success | Will | World |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

To do good in return for evil, to love your enemy, is a height of morality to which it may be doubted whether the social instincts would, by themselves, have ever led us.

Character | Enemy | Evil | Good | Love | Morality |

Thomas Jefferson

I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man.

Character | Faith | Good | Life | Life | Man | Morality | Public |

Louis Kronenberger

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all... of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Age | Character | Faith | Inquiry | Morality | Mystical | Science | Superstition | Truth |

Walter Lippmann

There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral... The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

Character | Effort | Good | Men | Morality | Nothing | Speculation | Will |

Luigi Luzzatti

The two essential factors of progress: morality and knowledge.

Character | Knowledge | Morality | Progress |

Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL

Science does not make us happy; the highest morality alone is capable of conferring true happiness upon us.

Character | Happy | Morality | Science | Happiness |

William H. Masters

Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.

Character | Morality | Science | Truth |

Plotinus NULL

It is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state.

Character | Conduct | Morality | Nature | Right | Soul |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

Character | Humanity | Liberty | Man | Morality | Nature | Rights | Surrender | Will |

Arthur Rimbaud, fully Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.”

Action | Character | Morality | Weakness |

Lord Samuel, Herbert Louis Samuel, First Viscount Samuel

Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

Character | Doubt | Morality | Myth |

John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury

Of all parts of wisdom, the practice is the best. Socrates was esteemed the wisest man of his time because he turned his acquired knowledge into morality and aimed at goodness more than greatness.

Character | Greatness | Knowledge | Man | Morality | Practice | Time | Wisdom |

Edwin Percy Whipple

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down to the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the common sense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.

Character | Common Sense | Light | Men | Morality | Nations | Proverbs | Sense | Time | Wise | Wit | Old |