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

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

If you're not selfish enough to want to feel good, then you can't connect with the energy that is your Source which does always feel good.

Desire | Will |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Be happy in anticipation of what's coming.

Desire | Energy | Good | Harmony | Will |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The entire Universe is set up to produce wanting within you. You cannot squelch wanting. You are born wanters. Wanting is a good thing.

Desire | Expectation | Expectation |

Esther Perel

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting.

Desire | Love | Sense |

Esther Perel

Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.

Desire | Knowing | Love |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Take the time to line up the Energy first, and action becomes inconsequential. If you don't take the time to line up the Energy, if you don't find the feeling place of what you're looking for, not enough action in the world will make any difference.

Desire | Money | Nature | Spirit | World |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

People say, "If I'm always setting goals and reaching for the future, then am I not squandering my now?" And we say, if in your NOW, you are using a future event to make you feel good, you are still feeling good in your now. And that's the best use of NOW that you could ever find.

Desire |

Eugene Peterson

We must extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates enclosed by our birth and death and acquire an understanding of God’s way as something larger and more complete than the anecdotes in our private diaries. Otherwise, we will always be “mistaking a sore throat for a descent into hell.”

Desire | Fulfillment | God | Growth | Infancy | Means | God | Blessed |

Eudora Welty

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

Enough | Imagination | Little | People | Praise | Wonder | Blessed |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Considered from the love in the real laws and in social forms of sexual union.

Desire | Means |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

Desire |

Eustace Budgell

But what has been often urged as a consideration of much more weight, is not only the opinion of the better sort, but the general consent of mankind to this great truth; which I think could not possibly have come to pass, but from one of the three following reasons: either that the idea of a God is innate and co-existent with the mind itself; or that this truth is so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason in persons of the most ordinary capacities; or, lastly, that it has been delivered down to us through all ages by a tradition from the first man. The Atheists are equally confounded, to whichever of these three causes we assign it.

Better | Desire | Good | Impression | Order | Time | Will | Words |

Euripedes NULL

Oh, trebly blest the placid lot of those whose hearth foundations are in pure love laid, where husband's breast with tempered ardor glows, and wife, oft mother, is in heart a maid!

Heart | Praise | Shame |

Eugenio Montale

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

Beginning | Desire | Life | Life | Meaning | Myth | Question |

Eustace Budgell

Lastly, if you propose to yourself the true end of argument, which is information, it may be a seasonable check to your passion; for if you search purely after truth, it will be almost indifferent to you where you find it. I cannot in this place omit an observation which I have often made, namely, That nothing procures a man more esteem and less envy from the whole company, than if he chooses the part of moderator, without engaging directly on either side in a dispute.

Desire |

Eustace Budgell

There is something so gross in the carriage of some wives that they lose their husbandsÂ’ hearts for faults which, if a man has either good-nature or good-breeding, he knows not how to tell them of. I am afraid, indeed, the ladies are generally most faulty in this particular; who at their first giving into love find the way so smooth and pleasant that they fancy it is scarce possible to be tired in it. There is so much nicety and discretion required to keep love alive after marriage, and make conversation still new and agreeable after twenty or thirty years, that I know nothing which seems readily to promote it but an earnest endeavor to please on both sides, and superior good sense on the part of the man.

Change | Desire | Despair | Esteem | Mind | Friendship | Value |

Euripedes NULL

Forgive, son; men are men; they needs must err.

Desire |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.

Aesthetic | Crime | Desire |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

I can never understand how two men can write a book together; to me, that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

Aesthetic | Crime | Desire |