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

William Gurnall

Mercy should make us ashamed, wrath afraid to sin.

Heaven |

William Gurnall

It is not only our duty to pray for others, but also to desire the prayers of others for ourselves.

Heaven |

William Gurnall

Many lose heaven because they are ashamed to go in a fool's coat thither.

Fear | Heaven | Hope |

William James

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Absolute | Body | Conscience | Consciousness | Education | Energy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Meaning | Miracles | Present | Religion | Science | World | God | Think |

William Law

The greatest saint in the world is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice. It is he who is most thankful to God.

Eternity | God | Soul | God |

William James

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds

Darkness | Dignity | Earth | God | Heaven | God |

William Law

All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.

Desire | Eternity | Heaven | Life | Life | Power | Prayer | Soul |

William Law

As the health and strength or weakness of our bodies is very much owing to their methods of treating us when we were young, so the soundness or folly of our minds is not less owing to those first tempers and ways of thinking which we eagerly received from the love, tenderness, authority, and constant conversation of our mothers.

Beauty | Heaven | Joy | Melody | Nothing | Serenity | Beauty |

William Law

The one supreme, unchangeable rule of love, which is a law to all intelligent beings of all worlds and will be a law to all eternity, is this, viz., that God alone is to be loved for Himself, and all other beings only in Him and for Him. Whatever intelligent creature lives not under this rule of love is so far fallen from the order of his creation, and is, till he returns to this eternal law of love, an apostate from God and incapable of the kingdom of Heaven. Now, if God is alone to be loved for Himself, then no creature is to be loved for itself; and so all self-love in every creature is absolutely condemned. And if all created beings are only to be loved in and for God, then my neighbor is to be loved as I love myself, and I am only to love myself as I love my neighbor or any other created being that is, only in and for God.

Earth | Heaven | Men | Obedience |

William James

Voluntary action is at all times a resultant of the compounding of our impulsions with our inhibitions.

Danger | Discipline | Eternity | God | Rest | Time | Training | Wills | Danger | God |

William Law

This therefore is a certain truth, that hell and death, curse and misery, can never cease or be removed from the creation till the will of the creature is again as it came from God and is only a Spirit of Love that wills nothing but goodness. All the whole fallen creation, stand it never so long, must groan and travail in pain, till every contrariety to the divine will is entirely taken from every creature. Which is only saying, that all the powers and properties of nature are a misery to themselves, can only work in disquiet and wrath, till the birth of the Son of God brings them under the dominion and power of the Spirit of Love.

Death | Eternity |

William Morris

Of rich men it telleth, and strange is the story how they have, and they hanker, and grip far and wide And they live and they die, and the earth and its glory has been but a burden they scarce might abide.

Death | Heaven | Hell | Hope | Little | Past | Pleasure | Power | Words |

William Morris

From out the throng and stress of lies, from out the painful noise of sighs, one voice of comfort seems to rise: "It is the meaner part that dies."

Earth | Heaven | Life | Life | Reward | World |

William Shakespeare

O here will I set of my everlasting rest and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world wearied flesh eyes look your last arms take your last embrace and lips all you the doors of breath seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death.

Darkness | Heaven | Love | Man | Power | Sympathy |

William Shakespeare

O! from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

Heaven |

William Shakespeare

Our Italy Shines o'er with civil swords; Sextus Pompeius Makes his approaches to the port of Rome; Equality of two domestic powers Breeds scrupulous faction; the hated, grown to strength, Are newly grown to love; the condemned Pompey, Rich in this father's honor, creeps apace Into the hearts of such as have not thrived Upon the present state, whose numbers threaten; And quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge By any desperate change.

Divinity | Indiscretion | Learn |

William Shakespeare

Our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Eternity | Life | Life |

William Shakespeare

Order gave each thing view.

Darkness | Heaven | Man | Power | Sympathy |

William Shakespeare

O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak it profanely), that neither having th' accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

Heaven | Love |

William Shakespeare

O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year. The Merry Wives of Windsor (Anne Page at III, iv)

Conscience | Cunning | Defeat | Devil | Father | Force | Gall | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Murder | Oppression | Passion | Play | Power | Property | Revenge | Soul | Spirit | Tears | Weakness | Will | Words | Murder | Guilty |