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

Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

To give pain is the tyranny - to make happy the true empire of beauty.

Beauty | Happy | Pain | Tyranny | Wisdom |

Richard and Greta Smolowe

We believe in a life continuum, and eternal life. Each incarnation or lifetime on earth is 'just a day in the classroom'... We believe the plane of greatest learning is the physical plane. It is up to all of us to make the most of each carnation. We believe that all there is in the universe is energy... and all energy forms, from subatomic particles to stars, are in a constant state of change and transformation... that interpreting energy frequencies on sensory bands creates the reality in which each life-form lives.

Change | Day | Earth | Energy | Eternal | Learning | Life | Life | Reality | Universe | Wisdom |

Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly conscious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

Music | Order | Wisdom |

William Graham Sumner

There is no state of readiness for war; the notion calls for never-ending sacrifices.

War | Wisdom |

Harold S. Streitfeld

To divide human functioning into the mental and physical is to make an artificial distinction. You are, in fact, one integrated being, functioning as a whole. Every physical state has emotional components.

Distinction | Wisdom |

George Szell, originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell

Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels the brain.

Heart | Music | Thinking | Unity | Wisdom |

Sydney Smith

The greatest curse that can be entailed on mankind is a state of war. All the atrocious crimes committed in years of peace, all that is spent in peace by the secret corruptions, or by the thoughtless extravagance of nations, are mere trifles compared with the gigantic evils which stalk over this world in a state of war. God is forgotten in war; every principle of Christianity is trampled upon.

Extravagance | God | Mankind | Nations | Peace | Trifles | War | Wisdom | World | God |

Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

Habit | Men | Obedience | Power | Rule | Wisdom |

Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

Youngsters and adults cannot learn if information is pressed into their brains. You can teach only by creating interest, by creating an urge to know. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed into it. First, one must create a state of mind that craves knowledge, interest and wonder.

Knowledge | Mind | Teach | Wisdom | Wonder | Learn |

Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

We may naturally believe that it is not the singular prosperity of the few, but the greater well-being of all that is most pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of men. What appears to me to be man’s decline, is His eye, advancement; what afflicts me is acceptable to Him. A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just: and its justice constitutes its greatness and its beauty. I would strive, then, to raise myself to this point of the divine contemplation and thence to view and judge the concerns of men.

Beauty | Contemplation | Equality | Greatness | Justice | Man | Men | Prosperity | Wisdom | Contemplation |

Lyall Watson

There seems to be direct link between truly creative intelligence and the ability to dilute consciousness, to cut mental corners and practice unusual, lateral thinking in what amounts almost to a state of trance. All the most profound insights seem to flow from breaches in the barrier between waking thought, which tends to be conservative, and dream logic, which is essential liberal.

Ability | Consciousness | Intelligence | Logic | Practice | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom |

Bernard Williams

Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless, I shall suggest; so, in a sense, death gives the meaning to life.

Death | Immortality | Life | Life | Meaning | Sense | Wisdom |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

There is no happiness without security- I mean the prospect of being able to rely on the permanence of a state into which one has settled oneself. This assurance is to be found either in the mastering of things, or in the mastering of self which makes one independent of things.

Security | Self | Happiness |

Henri Frédéric Amiel

Action limits us; whereas I the state of contemplation we are endlessly expansive.

Action | Contemplation | Contemplation |