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

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world.

Falsehood | Religion | Virtue | Virtue |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

There is no question what the roll of honor in America is. The roll of honor consists of the names of men who have squared their conduct by ideals of duty.

Good | Religion | Work |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.

Better | Money | Religion |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.

Hope | People | Religion |

Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

Consciousness | God | Means | Religion | Submission | Will | God |

Hugh Blair

By indulging this fretful temper you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends.

Cheerfulness | Dignity | Enjoyment | Folly | Joy | Mind | Mirth | Pleasure | Religion | Spirit | Struggle | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Happiness |

Hugh Blair

An honest man will never employ an equivocal expression; a confused man may often utter ambiguous ones without any design.

Principles | Religion | Strength | Will |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

A slow smile bent back his foliage. I’ve a mind to lay you down and split you like a rack of mutton. What do you say to that?

Religion | Sense |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

If death wants me, let him ride up on a pale mount, ashes in his mouth, ice in his testicles. Frankly, I do not like the way death does business.

Attention | Cause | Day | Death | Humor | Irony | Light | Memory | Religion | Sense | Thought | Will | Thought |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

My grandmother, he said, confessed to me once that before she'd ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she'd make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you've seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It's a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise.

Faith | Good | Hell | Religion |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: 'Who knows how to make love stay?'

Art | Enough | Land | Magic | Pleasure | Present | Religion | Science | Time | Art |

William James

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Conduct | Day | Feelings | Ideas | Indispensable | Life | Life | Phenomena | Religion | Theories | Thought | Thought |

William James

In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

Good | Religion |

William James

But who does not see that in a disbelieved or doubted or interrogative or conditional proposition, the ideas are combined in the same identical way in which they are in a proposition which is solidly believed.

Devil | Evil | Meaning | Peculiarity | Religion | Sacrifice | World | Happiness |

William James

A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.

Day | Doctrine | Enough | Experience | Religion |

William James

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Absolute | Body | Conscience | Consciousness | Education | Energy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Meaning | Miracles | Present | Religion | Science | World | God | Think |

William Law

He that rightly understands the reasonableness and excellency of charity will know that it can never be excusable to waste any of our money in pride and folly.

Envy | Life | Life | Means | Religion |

William James

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.

Church | God | Good | Happy | Heart | Love | Prayer | Reality | Religion | Talking | Thought | God | Thought | Understand |

William Law

Piety requires us to renounce no ways of life where we can act reasonably, and offers what we do to the glory of God.

Perfection | Piety | Pleasure | Progress | Reality | Reason | Receive | Religion | Wonder |

William Law

Why all this strife and zeal about opinions? Death and life go on their own way, carry on their own work, and stay for no opinions... What a delusion it is therefore to grow gray-headed in balancing ancient and modern opinions; to waste the precious uncertain fire of life in critical zeal and verbal animosities; when nothing but the kindling of our working will into a faith that overcometh the world, into a steadfast hope, and ever-burning love and desire of the divine life, can hinder us from falling into eternal death.

Enough | God | Good | Neglect | Religion | Taste | Terror | God |