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

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Language was a long time without having any other words than the names which had been given to sensible objects, such as these, tree, fruit, water, fire, and others, which they had more frequent occasion to mention.

Distinguish | Fear | Ideas | Metaphysics | Reason |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

TYRONE: [Stares at him -- impressed.] Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right. [Then protesting uneasily] But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND: [Sardonically] The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

Future | Past |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Speaking on the near skepticism of the study of the history of philosophy:

Criticism | Distinguish | Doubt | Effort | Existence | Faith | God | Mind | Modesty | Need | Question | Reason | Truth | God | Afraid |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Thus the most natural order of ideas required, that the government should precede the verb: they said, for example, fruit to want.

Music | Reason |

Eugene Peterson

If we're trying to set education policy, we have to listen to the education experts.

Defeat | Future | Mistake | Nature | Need | Obedience | Organic | Past | Unity | Vision | Will |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

And yet it is not always in our power to revive the perceptions we have felt. On some occasions the most we can do is by recalling to mind their names, to recollect some of the circumstances atr tending them, and an abstract idea of perception; an idea which we are capable of framing every instant, because we never think without being conscious of some perception which it depends on ourselves, to render genera).

Happy | Ideas | Imagination | Men | Reason |

Eugen Herrigel

Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out! he exclaimed. The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.

Aptitude | Awareness | Cult | Danger | Ego | Existence | Life | Life | Present | Reason | Right | Spirit | Success | Time | Witness | Worth | Talent | Danger | Awareness | Teacher |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

If one is a philosopher, he can do nothing else than philosophize; or, if he does something else, he will do it with a view to securing the freedom he needs for philosophizing.

Reason | World |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Dementia is only in the left austerity confuses a noble sentiment with a vile feeling.

Means | Reason |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

We can recognize the absolute transcendence of revelation by the curious fact of the philosophical and theological multiple meanings of the texts of scripture. When St. Thomas was looking for a sed contra for his question on the existence of God, he does not seem to have found a text in which Yahweh says in so many words, “I exist.” So he had recourse to the statement of Exodus: Ego sum qui sum. But that statement is a reply to the question Moses put to God: When the people ask me who has sent me to them, what shall I answer?

Existence | God | Philosophy | Reason | Sacred | Simplicity | Work | God |

Eugene Peterson

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.

Age | Experience | Future | God | Old age | People | Soul | Spirit | Study | Theology | God | Old |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

Future | Hope | Television | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Good | Human race | Nature | Race | Reason | Worth |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.

Balance | Life | Life | Nothing | Reason |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest — this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it. As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.

Age | Awakening | Conquest | Duty | Glory | History | Nothing | Object | Reason | War | Wealth | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

Future | Nothing | Novels | Will |

Eugenio Montale

The man of today has inherited a nervous system that cannot stand the current living conditions. Waiting to form the man of tomorrow, today's man reacts to the changed conditions by not objecting to shock but doing mass massificandosi.

Future | Man | System | Will |

Eustace Budgell

In short, a private education seems the most natural method for the forming of a virtuous man; a public education for making a man of business. The first would furnish out a good subject for PlatoÂ’s republic, the latter a member for a community overrun with artifice and corruption.

Education | Means | Men | Nothing | Order | Reason | Service | Temper | Think |