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

Samuel Butler

A man's work whether in music, painting or literature is always a portrait of himself.

Literature | Man | Music | Wisdom | Work |

Samuel Butler

Communication of all kinds is like painting - a compromise with impossibilities.

Wisdom |

Edgar Degas, born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Means | Wisdom |

Clarence Edwin Flynn

Aristotle said that all creative people are dissatisfied because they are looking for happiness in perfection and seeking for things that do not exist. This is one of the hopes of the world. There is no progress where people are satisfied. Discontent is perhaps the most potent challenge to improvement.

Challenge | Discontent | Improvement | People | Perfection | Progress | Wisdom | World | Happiness |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development as supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.

Achievement | Belief | Civilization | Existence | Faith | Illusion | Instinct | Perfection | Present | Wisdom | Work |

Peggy Guggenheim, formally Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim

The true artist sees the harmony, the wholeness, the tendencies toward perfection in things everywhere.

Harmony | Perfection | Wholeness | Wisdom |

Henry Robert Harrower

The practical man is the adventurer, the investigator, the believer in research, the asker of questions, the man who refuses to believe that perfection has been attained... There is no thrill or joy in merely doing that which any one can do... It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way.

Better | Joy | Man | Perfection | Research | Safe | Wisdom | Wrong | Old |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.

Defects | Imperfection | Life | Life | Light | Perfection | Progress | Suffering | Wholeness | Wisdom |

Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz

To realize in its completeness the universal beauty and perfection of the works of God, we must recognize a certain perpetual and very free progress of the whole universe, such that it is always going forward to greater improvement... Although many substances have already attained a great perfection, yet on account of the infinite divisibility of the continuous, there always remain in the abyss of things slumbering parts which have yet to be awakened, to grow in size and worth, and, in a word, to advance to a more perfect state. And hence no end of progress is ever reached.

Beauty | God | Improvement | Perfection | Progress | Size | Universe | Wisdom | Worth | Beauty |

Jacques Maritain

The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time.

Absolute | Association | Body | Choice | Conduct | Destiny | Dignity | Existence | Family | Freedom | God | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Order | Perfection | Personal freedom | Respect | Right | Rights | Society | Time | Will | Wisdom | Society | Respect | God | Value |

Jane Porter

Beauty of form affects the mind, but then it must not be the mere shell that we admire, but the thought that this shell is only the beautiful case adjusted to the shape and value of a still more beautiful pearl within. The perfection of outward loveliness is the soul shining through its crystalline covering.

Beauty | Mind | Perfection | Soul | Thought | Wisdom | Thought | Value |

Aloysius Michael Sullivan

The golden thread in the mind of man is the light that leads towards excellence as a human objective. If perfection is a divine attribute, excellence is a human incentive and a healthy aim, even when we fall short of the target.

Excellence | Light | Man | Mind | Perfection | Wisdom | Excellence |

Simonides, aka Simonedes of Ceos NULL

Painting is silent poetry, poetry painting that speaks.

Poetry | Wisdom |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

We are not speaking of the perfection of life, forces, and forms as increasing or decreasing according to the degrees of extension or continuity, because these degrees are generally known; but as ascending or descending according to the degrees of ascent, or discrete (discontinuous) degrees, can be but little known from things visible in the natural world.

Life | Life | Little | Perfection | Wisdom | World |

Howard Sparks

The art of our era is not art, but technology. Today Rembrandt is painting automobiles; Shakespeare is writing research reports.

Art | Era | Research | Technology | Wisdom | Writing | Art |