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

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the windows open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

Ernest Becker

Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nine­teenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primi­tive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reli­gions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Control | Death | Fighting | Good | Health | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Means | Necessity | Need | Play | Question | Reality | Right | Science | Security | Self-deception | Time | Will | World |

Ernest Callenbach

Maybe they have gone back to the stone age. Hunters used fancy bows and arrows to kill a deer.

Future | Impression |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Change | Politics | Will | Work |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.

Old |

Ernest Becker

To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

Contempt | Family | Heart | Ideas | Individuality | Life | Life | Little | Man | Means | Mystery | Need | Pain | Pride | Solitude | Words | Yearnings |

Ernest Callenbach

Certainly Ecotopians regard trees as being alive in almost a human sense Â… And equally certainly, lumber in Ecotopia is cheap and plentiful Â… Wood therefore takes the place that aluminum, bituminous facings, and many other modern materials occupy with us.

Feelings | Order | People |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course, I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in.

People | Words |

Ernest Becker

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |

Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith

"When an alluring woman comes in at the door," warningly traced the austere Kien-fi on the margin of his well-known essay, "discretion may be found up the chimney". It is incredible that beneath this ever-timely reminder an obscure disciple should have added the words: "The wiser the sage, the more profound the folly."

Bitterness | Friends |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.

Good | Happy | Love | Man | People | Wife |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia, Karkov grinned and began. First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls from them, then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool. Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. that is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool.

Knowledge | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Then he was sorry for the great fish... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.

Man | Panic | Pity | Will | Wise | Wonder | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Abstract | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The age demanded that we dance, and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.

Difficulty | Good | People |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

Courage | Good | Kill | People | Will | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

Good | Kill | Will | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

Time | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Children | Enough | Good | Men | People | Will |