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

Betsy Taylor

Try trusting that love is in our genetic code, that we are meant for it, and that it is our ultimate source of wisdom. It involves surrendering to not knowing while hungering to know. And perhaps this reconnection to what matters - through nature, human relationships, and the sacred dimension in life - will be the true source of power that takes us from here to there.

Knowing | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Power | Sacred | Will | Wisdom |

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do.

Nothing | Quiet |

Baltasar Gracián

The best remedy for disturbances is to let them run their course, for so they quiet down.

Quiet |

Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens

When the dust of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred stillness of the place, when the bright moon poured in her light on tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it seemed to them) upon her quiet grave - in that calm time, when all outward things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them, then, with tranquil and submissive hearts they turned away, and left the child with God.

God | Grave | Immortality | Light | Quiet | Sacred | Sound | Time | Child |

Cassiodorus, fully Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator NULL

Music doth extenuate fears, furies, appeaseth cruelty, abaeth heaviness, and to such as are wakeful it causeth quiet rest; it cures all irksomeness and heaviness of the soul.

Cruelty | Music | Quiet | Rest | Soul |

Franz Kafka

You need not do anything. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, just wait. And you need not even wait. Just become quiet and still and solitary and the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Choice | Ecstasy | Need | Quiet | Will | World |

George Bernard Shaw

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Human race | Patriotism | Quiet | Race | World |

George Santayana

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

Adventure | Age | Better | Nothing | Old age | Quiet | Spirit | Turmoil | Old |

Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Desperation | Men | Quiet | Resignation |

John Lyly or Lilly or Lylie

Nature hath giuen no man a country, no more than she hath a house or lands... and the same Moone shined, whereby he noted that euery place was a country to a wise man, and al parts a pallace to a quiet mind.

Man | Mind | Nature | Quiet | Wise |

José Ortega y Gasset

In order that a man may stop believing in some things, there must be germinating in him a confused faith in others. It is curious to note that almost always the dimension of life in which the new faith begins to establish itself is art.

Art | Faith | Life | Life | Man | Order |

John Ruskin

Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

Excellence | Life | Life | Quiet | Strength | Success | Will | Words |

John Ruskin

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Books | Life | Life | Quiet | Reading | Waste |

Joseph Addison

One of the most important, but one of the most difficult things to a powerful mind is to be its own master; a pond may lay quiet in a plain, but a lake wants mountains to compass and hold it in.

Important | Mind | Quiet | Wants |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

A society – the product of socialization – is made of spontaneous nurturing and love, while culture can be quiet hate, which can lead, sooner or later, to a child’s subtle or flagrant rebellion.

Culture | Hate | Love | Quiet | Rebellion | Society | Society |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

No media project succeeds based on “good news only” because good news does not trigger our alert system. Anything good indicates a safe space, the quiet background against which events can play out. The enculturated mind is cued to respond to the negative as a point of focus, which largely screens out or ignores a quiet stable base, and, because it sharpens and maintains our alert awareness, we actually begin to look for the negative.

Awareness | Events | Focus | Good | Mind | News | Play | Quiet | Safe | Space | System |

Kahlil Gibran

Love joins our present with the past and the future... Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods... Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from voiceless valleys... Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquillity of the soul in the depth of Eternity... And so, all who passed spoke of Love as the image of their hopes and frustrations, leaving it a mystery as before.

Body | Desire | Eternity | Existence | Future | Grave | Heart | Knowledge | Love | Men | Mystery | Past | Present | Quiet | Rest | Soul | Tranquility |

Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead as to its own. Such an one can do no deed however small but it is clothed with something of God’s power and authority.

Authority | God | Mind | Nothing | Power | Quiet | Self | Will | God |

Michael S. Josephson

Happiness is a kind of emotional resting place of quiet satisfaction with one's life.

Life | Life | Quiet |