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

Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

It is continued temperance which sustains the body for the longest period of time, and which most surely preserves it free from sickness.

Knowing | Life | Life | Nature | Personality |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . .

Experience | Fallacy | Giving | Happy | Little | Looks | Memory | Method | Mind | Story | Sympathy | Truth | Work |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

Heart | Language | Speech | World | Think |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

People | Price | World |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

If a joyous elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be very much like Whitman's famous "Song of Myself." It would have just about as much delicacy and deftness and discrimination.

Giving | Sympathy | Work |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

A few days more, and they landed—and then the battle. Twenty thousand were brought against us, a veteran force, furnish'd with good artillery.

Life | Life | Nothing | Receive | Will | Child | Old | Think |

Walter Brueggemann

People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress - in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness - dressed for the work that is to be done.

Darkness | Epiphany | Good | Grace | Light | People | Trust | Will |

Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson

I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life.

Character | Inevitable | Life | Life | Pain |

Walter Savage Landor

Lately our poets loiter'd in green lanes, content to catch the ballads of the plains; I fancied I had strength enough to climb a loftier station at no distant time, and might securely from intrusion doze upon the flowers thro' which Ilissus flows. In those pale olive grounds all voices cease, and from afar dust fills the paths of Greece. My sluber broken and my doublet torn, I find the laurel also bears a thorn.

Heaven | Hope | Rest | Thought | Will | Thought |

Walter Savage Landor

Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.

Children | God | Joy | Magic | Memory | Mortal | Promise | Words | God | Child | Old | Think |

Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an

That the sage is a sage is due solely to the fact that his mind is completely dominated by heaven-given principles, and not hampered by passion.

Heaven | Immortality |

Washington Irving

The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land, seems to have no genuine devotees in these peculiar villages; and unless some of its missionaries penetrate there, and erect banking houses and other pious shrines, there is no knowing how long the inhabitants may remain in their present state of contented poverty.

Mind |

Wayne Muller

Sabbath requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop, because our work is never completely done. With every accomplishment there arises a new responsibility... Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.

Hope | Wealth |

Wayne Newton, "Mr. Las Vegas"

After 9/11 we couldn't have had enough airplanes for the people who were volunteering to go. Now with 9/11 being as far removed as it is, the war being up one day and down the next, it becomes increasingly difficult to get people to go.

Life | Life |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

You have everything you need for complete peace and total happiness right now.

History | Unique |

Welsh Proverbs

A wife's advice is not worth much, but woe to the husband who refuses to take it.

Wendell Berry

The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy (right opinion). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before.

Bible | Care | God | Title | World | God | Bible |

Wendell Berry

Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

Life | Life | Means | Nothing | Spirit | Survival |

William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley

Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.

Sense |