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

Wendell Berry

All good human work remembers its history.

Giving | Money | Time |

Wendell Berry

The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

Adultery | Age | Disease | Giving | Man | Marriage | Public | Responsibility | Speech | Woman |

Wendell Berry

It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.

Enough | Freedom | Giving | Illusion | Man | Money | Noise | Peace | People | Play | Promise | Quiet | Slavery | Wonder | Old | Think |

Wendell Berry

The only true and effective operator's manual for spaceship earth is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

Art | Earth | Giving | Good | Work | Art |

Wendell Berry

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.

Ability | Arrogance | Behavior | Capacity | Change | Creativity | Danger | Doubt | Effort | Error | Good | Greed | Humility | Life | Life | Pride | Reverence | Sense | Will | World | Danger | Learn | Understand |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

As if in a school for gods, we learn the consequences of thought.

Conquest | Ego | Energy | Giving | Important | Impulse | Mystery | Self | Will |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing.

Adventure | Awareness | Defense | Demeanor | Experience | Extreme | Giving | Important | Indifference | Knowledge | Law | Means | Power | Qualities | Sacred | Time | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Awareness |

Walker Percy

What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it for the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October?

Fear | Giving | God | Ignorance | Object | Pleasure | Question | Search | Wants | God |

Walker Percy

But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: Recreation. Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.

Giving | Life | Life |

Walker Percy

What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

Age | Evil | Family | Giving | God | Good | Nothing | People | Plenty | Present | Religion | Thought | Following | God | Old | Think | Thought |

Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind; how the observation of last year seems childish, superficial; how this year — even this week — even with this new phrase — it seems to us that we have grown to a new maturity. It may be a fallacious persuasion, but at least it is stimulating, and so long as it persists, one does not stagnate.

Giving | Love | People |

Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

I came from nowhere, and shall be strong, steadfast, swift, eternally: I am a lion, a stone, a tree, and as the Polar star in me is fixed my constant heart on thee. Ah, may I stay forever blind with lions, tigers, leopards, and their kind.

Giving | Good | Little | Love | People | Wants |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

Let the stone be taken from the quarry two years before building is to begin, and not in winter, but in summer. Then let it lie exposed in an open place. Such stone as been damaged by the two years of exposure should be used in the foundations. The rest, which remains unhurt, has passed the test of nature and will endure in those parts of the building which are above ground.

Ability | Giving | Nature | Pleasure |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

There are three departments of architecture: the art of building, the making of time-pieces, and the construction of machinery.

Giving | Peculiarity |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

In the course of two years Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe did more to emancipate women and to make their status equal to that of the “strong” sex than all the advanced, enlightened, “democratic” republics of the world did in the course of 130 years.

Beginning | Giving | Objectives | Teach |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?

Business | Chance | Giving | Hell | Respect | Tragedy | Will | Respect | Business | Old |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

Genius | Giving |

Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

Morally, the life of the organization must be of exemplary nature. This is one phase where the organization must not have criticism.

Greatness | Humility | Meekness | Qualities | Simplicity |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or God will damn you,' will presently say, 'Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.'

Charity | Giving | Man | Money | Will |

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

I have a terrible need of – dare I say the word? – religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

Giving | Rest | Style | Time |