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

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties. - Hope is bom in the long night of watching and tears. - Faith visits us in defeat and disappointment, amid the consciousness of earthly frailty and the crumbling tombstones of mortality.

Public | Sense |

Edwin Percy Whipple

As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. - Armies cannot protect it then; and walls that have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.

Imitation | Model | Style |

Edward Scribner Ames

We have overdeveloped the individualism that arose in a pioneer country. We are destined to become more co-operative, more collectivistic, and to find in this direction still greater opportunity for the individual, not so much restricted and defeated by competition but enlarged and enhanced by the support of a common will. It may be that the problem of material goods--of the necessary but yet external goods of food, clothing, shelter, and money-is about to be solved through new discoveries and developments, with the energies of men left freer than they have ever been to cultivate on higher levels the sharable goods of life, such as love and wisdom. These values grow with use and multiply by being freely shared.

Business | Church | Defiance | God | Isolation | Knowledge | Organic | Sense | Society | Society | Business | God | Old |

Sei Shōnagon

Even on this festive day, when all are seeking butterflies and flowers, you and you alone can see what feelings hide within my heart.

Absurd | Sense | Sound | Will |

Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the people of Tibet will be scattered like ants across the world and the dharma will come to the land of the red man.

Age | Lying | People | Sense |

Hu Shih, or Hú Shì

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.

Absolute | Sense | Truth |

Egyptian Proverbs

Man proposes, God disposes.

Responsibility | Sense | Will | Learn |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family life

Faith | Sense |

Egyptian Proverbs

When the angels appear, the devils run away.

People | Sense |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

Down there, between the dreary trunks of the beeches, houses lay like a sediment in the cup of the misty valley: great gabled carcasses, villas aping the manor, belfried garages where you could feel the cars get cold.

Sense |

Elif Safak

No matter who, what part of the world we live, live, until a sense of a lack of deep down we are moving. It's a basic thing we are afraid of not getting lost it in the back. Bilenimizde what is missing very little indeed.

Change | Childhood | Life | Life | Religion | Sense | Time | Truth | Understanding | Woman | World |

Elihu Root

Cruelty to men and to the lower animals as well, which would have passed unnoticed a century ago, now shocks the sensibilities and is regarded as wicked and degrading.

Circumstances | Justice | Right | Sense |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

The straight sunny tombstones looked sociable, fresh wreaths were laid on the breasts of the graves. You could almost see the dead sitting up holding their flowers, like invalids on a visiting-day, waiting to hear the music. Only the very new dead, under raw earth with no tombstones, lay flat in despair…

Degeneracy | Novels | Reading | Sense |

Elif Safak

No reason to feel depressed about being depressed. A depression can be a golden opportunity to collect the pieces and build ourselves anew. Global Souls are always on the move, nomads at heart, connected to various cities, commuters between cultures, both from here and everywhere.

Little | Sense | World | Afraid |

William Shakespeare

Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?

Business | Mercy | Sense | Sorrow | Business |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me.

Duty | Sense | Happiness |

Elizabeth Gilbert

But I don't know how much more socializing I can do, Felipe. I only have the one dress. People will start to notice that I'm wearing the same thing all the time. You're young and beautiful, darling. You only need the one dress.

Energy | Good | Love | Money | Qualities | Sense | Will |

Elizabeth Gilbert

It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.

Better | Destiny | Imitation | Life | Life |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.

Sense | Time |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

'Tis aye a solemn thing to me to look upon a babe that sleeps-- wearing in its spirit-deeps the unrevealed mystery of its Adam's taint and woe, which, when they revealed lie, will not let it slumber so.

Life | Life | Love | Sense | Service |