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

Claude-Adrien Helvétius

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Books | Insult | Reading | Wisdom | Insult |

Édouard Jules Henri Pailleron

Have success and there will always be fools to say that you have talent.

Success | Will | Wisdom |

Samuel Palmer

Wise men make Proverbs, but Fools repeat 'em.

Men | Proverbs | Wisdom | Wise |

Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

The wise who consorts with fools will become a fool, and the fool who consorts with fools will become a greater fool.

Will | Wisdom | Wise |

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over.

Enough | God | Irony | Man | Wisdom |

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

I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.

Cowardice | Display | Fear | Intelligence | People | Pleasure | Thought | Wisdom | Work | Thought |

Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Lesson | Life | Life | Right |

Thomas Jefferson

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.

Children | Coercion | Men | Uniformity | World |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and time again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. This, however, is a truth which only profits the man who is temperamentally convinced of the individual and irreducible reality of his fellow man.

Individual | Life | Life | Man | Personality | Reality | Time | Truth |

Rinzai, aka Lin- Chi Yi-Sen, Lin-chi I-hsuan, Rinzai Gigen, Venerable Master Lin Chi NULL

When hungry I eat; when tired, I sleep. Fools laugh at me. The wise understand.

Wise |

Lawrence G. Lovasik

Any fool can try to defend his mistakes - and most fools do - but it gives one a feeling of nobility to admit one's mistakes. By fighting, you never get enough, but by yielding, you get more than you expected.

Enough | Fighting | Nobility | Yielding |

Adolph Hitler

A majority can never replace the individual. Just as a hundred fools do not make a wise man, a heroic decision is not likely to come from a hundred cowards.

Decision | Individual | Majority | Man | Wise |