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

Ernest Becker

Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.

Awareness | Comfort | Culture | Dedication | Evolution | Fury | Giving | Hope | Life | Life | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Society | Time | Society | Awareness | Understand |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Change | Politics | Will | Work |

Ernest Becker

To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

Contempt | Family | Heart | Ideas | Individuality | Life | Life | Little | Man | Means | Mystery | Need | Pain | Pride | Solitude | Words | Yearnings |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

Enough | Important | Life | Life | People | Will |

Ernest Becker

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

Authority | Good | Ideals | Ideas | Immortality | Life | Life | Little | Man | Means | People | Truth | Following |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

Life | Life | Love |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then, one day, for no reason, he sees you as ugly as you really are and he is not blind anymore and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling... After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful, grows slowly in one again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over.

Life | Life | Romance |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Good | Life | Life | Nothing | Will | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach. It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting at the edge of the Stream, and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.

Politics |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

Life | Life |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. I t was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries. Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places. Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well-mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married - time would fix that - and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted.

Life | Life |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?

Experience | Life | Life | Ugly |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Scott took literature so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

Daughter | Day | Happy | Life | Life | Wife | Work |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

Life | Life | Meaning | Will | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

Ability | Day | Good | Life | Life | Nothing | People | Thinking | Truth | Will | Work | Writing |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Hell | Life | Life | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Destroy | Enough | Good | Government | Life | Life | Order | Patriotism | Wishes | Government |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.

Enough | Good | Life | Life |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

So if your life trades seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

Death | Good | Life | Life |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

Ability | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Money | Nothing | Price | Reward | Thought | Work | World | Thought |