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

Louis-Aimé Martin

Whatever may be the laws and customs of a country, women always give the tone to morals. Whether slaves or free, they reign, because their empire is that of the affections.

Character |

Honoré de Balzac

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman’s glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

Character | Events | Heart | Little | Woman |

Samuel Butler

To have the power to forgive, is empire and prerogative, and ‘tis in crowns a nobler gem, to grant a pardon than condemn.

Character | Pardon | Power |

George Douglas Brown, pseud. Kennedy King

Immortality! We bow before the very term. Immortality! Before its reason staggers, calculation reclines her tired head, and imagination folds her weary pinions. Immortality! It throws open the portals of the vast forever; it puts the crown of deathless destiny upon every human brow; it cries to every uncrowned king of men, “Live forever, crowned for the empire of a deathless destiny!”

Destiny | Imagination | Immortality | Men | Reason | Wisdom |

David Hume

Notwithstanding the empire of the imagination, there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other... These principles of association are reduced to three, viz. Resemblance... Contiguity... Causation... as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are only ties of our thought, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them.

Appearance | Association | Ideas | Imagination | Means | Mind | Principles | Thought | Universe | Wisdom | Association | Thought |

Jane Porter

When Alexander had subdued the world, and wept that none were left to dispute his arms, his tears were an involuntary tribute to a monarchy that he knew not - man’s empire over himself.

Dispute | Man | Tears | Wisdom | World |

Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

To give pain is the tyranny - to make happy the true empire of beauty.

Beauty | Happy | Pain | Tyranny | Wisdom |

Herbert Butterfield, fully Sir Herbert Butterfield

Butterfield, Empire is neither built nor maintained without some strokes of hard policy and with the generation of deep resentments. And if we are sometimes exasperated by officialdom even at home, can we imagine what must be the reaction of awakening minds in regions where the officialdom represents the foreigner, and the foreigner is in the country also to exploit it?

Awakening | Exploit | Policy |

Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

Without freedom there is no foundation for our Empire; without Empire there is no safeguard for our freedom.

Freedom |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

It is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save their honor, their religion, their soul and lay the foundation for that empire's fall or its regeneration.

Honor | Individual | Religion | Soul |

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Prison walls cannot confine him who loves, for he belongs to an empire that is not of this world, being made not of material things but of the meaning of things; and thus he mocks at walls.

Meaning | Prison | World |

Edmund Burke

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Little | Magnanimity | Politics | Wisdom |

Francis Bacon

The empire of man over things is founded on the arts and sciences alone, for nature is only to be commanded by obeying her.

Man | Nature |

John Dryden

All empire is no more than power in trust.

Power | Trust |

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Man who man would be, must rule the empire of himself.

Man | Rule |

Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL

No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself. No man is free who cannot command himself.

Man |

Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy

Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men moved the world, and so can we all.

Action | Earth | Ignorance | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Men | Nothing | Thought | Will | Woman | Work | World | Old | Thought |