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

Benjamin R. Haydon

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

Death | Love | Wisdom |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

A statesman should follow public opinion as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins, and guiding them.

Opinion | Public | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

[The man is free] who is self-reliant... who masters his passions; who fears neither poverty nor death nor prison; who resists his appetites [and] despises worldly ambition.

Ambition | Death | Man | Poverty | Prison | Self | Wisdom |

Robert Hutchins, fully Robert Maynard Hutchins

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Apathy | Death | Democracy | Indifference | Will | Wisdom |

Washington Irving

In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow-men, he is constantly acting a studied part. The bold and peculiar traits of native character are refined away or softened down by the leveling influence of what is termed good-breeding, and he practices so many petty deceptions and affects so many generous sentiments for the purposes of popularity that it is difficult to distinguish his real from his artificial character.

Character | Distinguish | Existence | Influence | Life | Life | Man | Opinion | Popularity | Wisdom |

Thomas Hobbes

The nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what He is, but only that He is; and therefore the attributes we give Him are not to tell one another what He is, nor to signify our opinion of His nature, but our desire to honor Him with such names as we conceive most honorable amongst ourselves.

Desire | God | Honor | Nature | Nothing | Opinion | Wisdom | God | Understand |

Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger

The grave is a sacred workshop of nature! a chamber for the figure of the body; death and life dwell here together as man and wife. They are one body, they are in union; God has joined them together, and what God hath joined together let no man put asunder.

Body | Death | God | Grave | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Sacred | Wife | Wisdom | God |

Soozi Holbeche

I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation.

Absolute | Acceptance | Age | Body | Choice | Coercion | Death | Enemy | Experience | Fear | Life | Life | Opportunity | People | Right | Sense | Soul | Thinking | Thought | Time | Understanding | Unique | Wisdom | Words | Thought |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

We find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and most humane in political practice.

Eternity | Events | Practice | Theology | Time | Wisdom |

David Hume

So that, upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexion which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any ties between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected. And as we have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life. But there still remains one method of avoiding this conclusion, and one source which we have not yet examined.

Events | Life | Life | Meaning | Method | Nature | Power | Sense | Sentiment | Wisdom | Words |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all ego-hood. Out of these all-uniting depths arises the dream, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral... Death is psychologically as important as birth... Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

Abnormal | Birth | Consciousness | Darkness | Death | Dreams | Ego | Eternal | Important | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

Only death reveals what a nothing the body is for man.

Body | Death | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |

Holger Kalweit

Initiation always signifies death and resurrection. This is as true of the rites of passage marking the entry to a new phase of life as it is of shamanic initiation. The former life must be destroyed and erased.

Death | Life | Life | Rites | Wisdom |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Everything begins with an idea. Your thoughts are the blueprint for your life. Your thoughts today create your world of tomorrow. Change your thoughts and you will change your world. Through the power of your thinking, you are continuously drawing kinds of events into your life. You have absolute control over your reactions.

Absolute | Change | Control | Events | Life | Life | Power | Thinking | Tomorrow | Will | Wisdom | World |