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

Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL

Our purpose is to live in harmony with those cycles [birth, growth, death and regeneration] to develop our peculiar organs of consciousness and creativity to add to the beauty, love, humor, diversity and general interest of the world.

Beauty | Birth | Consciousness | Creativity | Death | Diversity | Growth | Harmony | Humor | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom | World |

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson

Every man at time of Death, would fain set forth some saying that may live after his death and better humankind; for death gives life’s last word a power to live, and, like the stone-cut epitaph, remain after the vanished voice, and speak to men.

Better | Death | Life | Life | Man | Men | Power | Time | Wisdom |

Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler

Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound.

Absence | Death | Nothing | Sound | Time | Wisdom |

William Gilmore Simms

The death of censure is the death of genius.

Censure | Death | Genius | Wisdom |

William Warburton

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any; one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.

Birth | Wisdom |

James Thomson

The world rolls round for ever like a mill; it grinds out death and life, and good and ill. It has not purpose, heart or mind or will.

Death | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | World |

Union Prayer Book NULL

Like a child falling asleep over his toys, man loosens his grasp on earthly possessions only when death overtakes him.

Death | Man | Possessions | Wisdom | Child |

William K. Vanderbilt, fully William Kissam Vanderbilt

Inherited wealth... is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to mortality.

Ambition | Death | Wealth | Wisdom | Ambition |

Daniel Webster

The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality, to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations - the relation between the creature and his Creator.

Contemplation | Death | Individuality | Wisdom | Contemplation |

Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race.

Death | Human race | Indifference | Nature | Race | Wisdom |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Did we think victory great? So it is - but now it seems to me, when it cannot be helped, that defeat is great and that death and dismay are great.

Death | Defeat | Wisdom | Think |

Bernard Williams

Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless, I shall suggest; so, in a sense, death gives the meaning to life.

Death | Immortality | Life | Life | Meaning | Sense | Wisdom |

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali

The meaning of death is not the annihilation of the spirit, but its separation from the body, and that the resurrection and day of assembly do not mean a return to a new existence after annihilation, but the bestowal of a new form or frame to the spirit.

Body | Day | Death | Existence | Meaning | Spirit |

Julius Wilhelm Zinkgräf

One who longs for death is miserable, but more miserable is he who fears it.

Death | Wisdom |

Edward Young

While man is growing, life is in decrease, and cradles rock us nearer to the tomb; our birth is nothing but our death begun.

Birth | Death | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |