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

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.

Character | Mediocrity | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |

Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence, born Frederick Lawrence

If I were asked to sum up in a single phrase the main purpose of individual life I would express it as the enlargement of personality. Unless an individual can transcend the limits of class, sex, race, age and creed, his personality remains of necessity to that extent incomplete.

Age | Character | Creed | Individual | Life | Life | Necessity | Personality | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Wisdom |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

Not by age but by character is wisdom attained.

Age | Character | Wisdom |

Edwin McNeill Poteat

Freedom is placed in jeopardy more by those who will not exercise it than by those who will not permit it. Indifference opens more gates to the enemy than does tyranny.

Character | Enemy | Freedom | Indifference | Tyranny | Will |

Michael Novak

It is a mistake to base one’s hopes for happiness upon the enforcement of security and equality. In principle, both desires are insatiable... No individual or society is secure in a world of emergent probability and sin... To exercise liberty is to take risks, to embrace uncertainties.

Character | Equality | Individual | Liberty | Mistake | Security | Sin | Society | World | Society | Happiness |

Austin O'Malley

After thirty-five a man begins to have thoughts about women; before that age he has feelings.

Age | Character | Feelings | Man |

Plotinus NULL

The pinions of your soul will have power to still the untamed body. The creature will yield only to watchful, strenuous constancy of habit. Purify your soul from all undue hope and fear about earthly things, mortify the body, deny self - affections as well as appetites - and the inner eye will begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision.

Body | Character | Constancy | Fear | Habit | Hope | Power | Self | Soul | Vision | Will |

Abba Hillel Silver

When is a man free? Now when he is driftwood on the stream of life... free of all cares or worries or ambitions... He is not free at all... To be free in action, in struggle, in undiverted and purposeful achievement, to move forward towards a worthy objective across a fierce terrain of resistance, to be vital and allow in the exercise of a great enterprise - that is to be free, and to know the joy and exhilaration of true freedom. A man is free only when he has an errand on earth.

Achievement | Action | Character | Earth | Freedom | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Struggle |

Albert Schweitzer

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.

Character | Faith | Man | Problems | Responsibility | Will | Learn |

John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury

The best people need afflictions for trial of their virtue. How can we exercise the grace of contentment, if all things succeed well; or that of forgiveness, if we have no enemies?

Character | Contentment | Forgiveness | Grace | Need | People | Virtue | Virtue | Trial |

William L. Sullivan

Solitary we must be in life's great hours of moral decisions; solitary in pain and sorrow; solitary in old age and in our going forth at death. Fortunate the man who has learned what to do in solitude and brought himself to see what companionship he may discover in it, what fortitude, what content.

Age | Character | Death | Fortitude | Life | Life | Man | Old age | Pain | Solitude | Sorrow | Companionship | Old |

Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one every thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Age | Good | Myth | People | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Old | Thought |

Daniel Webster

We are too much inclined to underrate the power of moral influence, the influence of public opinion, and the influence of the principles to which great men - the lights of the world, and of the present age - have given their sanction.

Age | Character | Influence | Men | Opinion | Power | Present | Principles | Public | World |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

If there is free will, all things do not happen according to fate; if all things do not happen according to fate, there is not a certain order of causes; and if there is not a certain order of causes, neither is there a certain order of things foreknown by God - for things cannot come to pass except they are preceded by efficient causes - but if there is no fixed and certain order of causes foreknown by God, all things cannot be said to happen according as He foreknew that they would happen... But it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God and is embraced by His foreknowledge, for human wills are also causes of human actions; and He Who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills.

Fate | Free will | God | Nothing | Order | Will | Wills | Wisdom | God |

Apocrypha NULL

Let not anxiety enter your heart, for it has killed many strong men... Anxiety brings on old age prematurely.

Age | Anxiety | Anxiety | Heart | Men | Old age | Wisdom | Old |

Hans Christian Anderson

Time is so fleeting that if we do not remember God in our youth, age may find us incapable of thinking about him.

Age | God | Thinking | Time | Wisdom | Youth | God |

Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

We can't reach old age by another man's road.

Age | Character | Man | Old age | Old |

William Warburton

Of all exercises there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the understanding or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wisdom.

Character | Heart | Imagination | Knowledge | Mind | Nature | Understanding | Wisdom |