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

Stefan Zweig

The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.

Error | Organic | People | Learn | Understand |

Thomas Carlyle

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

Error | Man | Men |

Thomas Hardy

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.

Error |

Thomas Hobbes

Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.

Error |

Thomas Hardy

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Error |

Thomas Hobbes

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

Crime | Error | Force |

Thomas Jefferson

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.

Avarice | Competition | Error | Evil | Property | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

Censor | Error | Majority | Office | Opinion | Persuasion | Reason | Uniformity | World |

Thomas Jefferson

If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world it is to your country its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.

Change | Error | Opinion | Reason |

Thomas Jefferson

I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.

Error | Good | Men | Power | Right | Theology | Truth |

Thomas Jefferson

His parentage was obscure; his condition poor; his education null; his natural endowments great; his life correct and innocent: he was meek, benevolent, patient, firm, disinterested, and of the sublimest eloquence. The disadvantages under which his doctrines appear are remarkable. Like Socrates and Epictetus, he wrote nothing himself.

Association | Error | Government | Hypothesis | Nature | Society | Will | Association | Society | Government | Think |

Thomas Jefferson

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

Absolute | Age | Care | Commerce | Creed | Error | Freedom | Government | Justice | Labor | Peace | People | Principles | Public | Revolution | Right | Sacred | Safe | War | Will | Wisdom | Friendship | Government | Trial | Commerce | Parent | Understand |

Thomas Jefferson

Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

Corruption | Era | Error | Government | Inquiry | Religion | Will | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

Let this be the distinctive mark of an American that in cases of commotion, he enlists himself under no man's banner, inquires for no man's name, but repairs to the standard of the laws. Do this, and you need never fear anarchy or tyranny. Your government will be perpetual.

Error | Opinion | Reason |

Thomas Jefferson

The evidence of [the] natural right [of expatriation], like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of Kings.

Authority | Coercion | Conscience | Error | Government | Rights | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

Argument | Belief | Desire | Dispute | Error | Force | Habit | Men | Opinion | Question | Right | Wants | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.

Error | Reason | Truth | Afraid |

Thomas Jefferson

There can be no safer deposit on earth than the Treasury of the United States.

Error | Humanity | Reason | World |

Thomas Jefferson

Truth and reason are eternal. They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail; however, in times and places they may be overborne for a while by violence, military, civil, or ecclesiastical.

Error |

Thomas Jefferson

We are bound, you, I, and every one to make common cause, even with error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience.

Change | Error | Opinion | Reason |