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

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 |

Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman

The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material.

Inspiration | Intuition | Invention | Vision | Wisdom |

Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve

The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce.

Ability | Education | Future | Knowledge | Past | Service | Skill | Vision | Wisdom | Think |

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 |

R. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz

The Kaddish is not a prayer for the dead, but a mandate for the living... It bids man rise above his sorrow... and fixes his view upon the welfare of mankind. It lifts his hope and vision to a day... when mankind shall at last inhabit the earth as children of the one God and Father, and justice reign supreme in peace.

Children | Day | Earth | Father | God | Hope | Justice | Man | Mankind | Peace | Prayer | Sorrow | Vision | Wisdom | God |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

In the whole range of human vision nothing is more attractive than to see a young man full of promise and of hope, bending all his energies in the direction of truth and duty and God, his soul pervaded with the loftiest enthusiasm, and his life consecrated to the noblest ends. To be such a young man is to rival the noblest and best of men in heroic valor.

Duty | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nothing | Promise | Soul | Truth | Vision | Wisdom | World |

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 |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Art | Culture | Society | Vision | Wisdom | Society | Art |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of men's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist... faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.

Arrogance | Art | Diversity | Experience | Individual | Judgment | Man | Men | Mind | Poetry | Power | Reality | Sensibility | Society | Vision | Wisdom | Society | Art | Truths |

John Angell James

Let us never forget that, to be profited, that is, to be spiritually improved in knowledge, faith, holiness, joy and love, is the end of hearing sermons, and not merely to have our taste gratified by genius, eloquence and oratory.

Faith | Genius | Joy | Knowledge | Love | Oratory | Taste | Wisdom |

Lame Deer, fully John Fire Lame Deer, aka The Old Man, born Tȟáȟča Hušté

Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don’t use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don’t use the knowledge of the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere - a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big, empty hole which they find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It’s a quick comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads to. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there in my vision and it makes me shudder to think about it.

Dreams | Knowledge | Spirit | Vision | Waiting | Wisdom | Think |

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 |

Lactantius, fully Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius NULL

The mind is guilty of adultery even if it merely pictures to itself a vision of carnal pleasure.

Adultery | Mind | Pleasure | Vision | Wisdom | Guilty |

Groucho Marx, Pseudonym for Julius Henry Marx

One of the best hearing aids a man can have is an attentive wife.

Man | Wife | Wisdom |

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 |