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

Pinchos Hurwitz

A large amount of physical pain and suffering is caused by one’s thoughts and behaviors. The desire for food causes people to overeat and consume food that is harmful to their health. Envy, anger, and honor-seeking lead to diseases of the heart, high blood pressure, nervous tension and excessive stress. Moreover, even when you pain is basically caused by physical symptoms, your mental attitude towards the pain can greatly increase or decrease the actual amount of suffering you experience. The pain you suffer from illnesses and injuries is frequently more psychological than physical. A person who learns to master a calm and serene attitude towards life trains himself to tolerate physical pain and the actual suffering is greatly lessened.

Anger | Character | Desire | Envy | Experience | Health | Heart | Honor | Life | Life | Pain | People | Suffering |

Paul W. Ivey, fully Paul Wesley Ivey

Study the unusually successful people you know, and you will find them imbued with enthusiasm for their work which is contagious. Not only are they themselves excited about what they are doing, but they also get you excited.

Character | Enthusiasm | People | Study | Will | Work |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

When we choose to give to others, we will appreciate how much we have - no matter how little it may actually be. And when we start to love our neighbors, we will end up also loving ourselves.

Character | Little | Love | Will |

David Hume

Curiosity, or the love of knowledge, has a very limited influence, and requires youth, leisure, education, genius and example to make it govern any person.

Character | Curiosity | Education | Example | Genius | Influence | Knowledge | Leisure | Love | Youth | Govern |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

Character | Freedom | Intelligence | Love |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Most people tend to perform the actions that require least effort, to think the thoughts that are easiest, to feel the emotions that are most vulgarly commonplace, to give the rein to desires that are most nearly animal.

Character | Effort | Emotions | People | Think |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there’s a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great.

Character | Mind | Reason | Understanding | Will | Think |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Character | Ends | Justify | Means | Nature | Reason |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Body | Character | Consistency | Life | Life | Mind | Nature | People |

Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL

If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, pursue by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge, for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth , for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time.

Better | Character | Good | Knowledge | Love | Time | Wealth | Will | Friends |

Trevor Huddleston

We are created by God for union with Himself... That’s really the meaning of heaven too: fulfillment, wholeness... Though no man has seen God, we have to learn how to love God through loving one another.

Character | Fulfillment | God | Heaven | Love | Man | Meaning | Wholeness | God | Learn |

Pinchos Hurwitz

“What thoughts were going through your mind when you received so much honor?” “I imagined that it was my funeral procession and the people were escorting me to the cemetery. This prevented me from feeling arrogant.”

Character | Honor | Mind | People |

Maria Jane Jewsbury

Love is the purification of the heart from self; it strengthens and ennobles the character; gives higher motive and nobler aim to every action of life, and makes both man and woman strong, noble, and courageous. The power to love truly and devotedly is the nobles gift with which a human being can be endowed; but it is a sacred fire that must not be burned to idols.

Action | Character | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Power | Sacred | Self | Woman |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

Life and love are not essentially about “a few persons nearest us.” They are found in the spiritual nature that unites us, even if everything else separates us. Apart from this unity, we are still lonesome and alienated - we are merely lonesome together, alienated together.

Character | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Unity |

Ron and Mary Hulnick, formally H. Ronald Hulnick and

Because I am the only person I will have a relationship with all of my life, I choose: To love myself the way I am now. To always acknowledge that I am enough just the way I am. To love, honor and cherish myself. To be my own best friend. To be the person I would like to spend the rest of my life with. To always take care of myself so that I can take care of others. To always grow, develop and share my love and life.

Care | Character | Enough | Friend | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Relationship | Rest | Will |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility.

Character | Knowledge | Love |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

We can only love what we know and we can never know completely what we do not love.

Character | Love |

William James

In ethical, psychological and aesthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one’s judgment is universally recognized as a mark of rare genius. The helplessness of uneducated people account for their likes and dislikes is often ludicrous.

Aesthetic | Character | Genius | Judgment | People | Reason |

Thomas Jefferson

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Character | Control | Discretion | Education | Enough | People | Safe | Society | Society | Think |

David Hume

Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.

Character | Disbelief | Morality | Peace | Reason | Society |