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

William James

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not so.

Example | Giving | Reason |

William Morris

I have the utmost respect for them. It was formed at the time of great violence and danger, particularly for African-American lawyers.

Art | Destroy | Energy | Giving | Hope | Impulse | Labor | Work | Worth | Art |

William Morris

Let us speak, love, together some words of our story, that our lips as they part may remember the glory! O soft day, o calm day, made clear for our sake!

Dreams | Giving | World |

Drew Curtis

I love Sweden. The entire world should be like Sweden. They all like to drink and get naked, and the women are hot. I can't think of a better nation on the planet.

Argument | Giving | Guarantee | Judgment | Reality | Will |

William Shakespeare

Portia adieu! I have too griev'd a heart to take a tedious leave.

Giving |

William Shakespeare

Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father's dead. Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief shore his old thread in twain.

Giving |

Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

When the degenerate age of this aeon arrives, people are their own deceivers, their own bad counsel, the makers of their own stupidity, lying to a fooling themselves. How sad that these people have human forms but possess no more sense than an ox!

Giving | Merit | Practice |

Edwin Percy Whipple

We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.

Giving | Money | Refinement | Taste | Old |

Eileen Garrett

Insight is within the grasp of the dreamer, for he escapes the waking intensity which tends to hold back the vitality that bids us carry on with life, often as underground levels. The eternal now instinctively carries us forward and contains within it knowledge and experience of the routes ahead, even though those routes are dimmed when we awaken to each day's new experiences. The prediction is clear in a dreaming world, but the route is clouded when we surface to live out the day's experience. The outer eye discerns only what is to be undertaken in a three-dimensional world.

Age | Dreams | Evolution | Giving | Happy | Man | Technology | World |

Egyptian Proverbs

It is a wretched thing to injure a poor man.

Giving | Teach |

Elif Safak

How to deal with the goodness of their loved ones? Could be fought against goodness?

Chastity | Earth | Giving | Good | Guilt | Impression | Responsibility | Self | Truth | Wrong |

Elif Safak

I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples.

Humility | Nature | Peace | Strength | Will | World |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

You can't whip folks into line on statehood like you can on a budget vote. People have to believe in your cause.

Children | Giving | Good | Need | Public | Thinking |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

Fear | Giving | Happy | Love | Will | Learn |

Dorothy Parker

They say of me, and so they should, it's doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends accumulating dividends and making enviable names in science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, keep doing things I think are nice, and though to good I never come inseparable my nose and thumb.

Art | Battle | Giving | Little | Love | Thinking | Work | Art |

Dorothy Parker

You think you're frightening me with your hell, don't you? You think Yyur hell is worse than mine.

Books | Giving | Literature | Present | Trial |

Emil M. Cioran

What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Better | Giving |

Emile Zola

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Eternal | Giving | Love | Lying |