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

Walter Hilton

One who loves God retains this humility at all times, not with weariness and struggle, but with pleasure and gladness.

Error | Looks |

Walter Lippmann

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.

Error | Study |

Washington Irving

The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.

Affliction | Agony | Consolation | Duty | Error | Friend | Grief | Love | Meditation | Mother | Present | Sadness | Sorrow | Child |

Wendell Berry

If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.

Better | Death | Error | Good | Hell | Life | Life | Past |

Wendell Berry

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.

Ability | Arrogance | Behavior | Capacity | Change | Creativity | Danger | Doubt | Effort | Error | Good | Greed | Humility | Life | Life | Pride | Reverence | Sense | Will | World | Danger | Learn | Understand |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

The word 'Intellectual' suggests straight away - A man who's untrue to his wife

Error | Important | Love | Man | Woman |

Victor Hugo

There is in admiration a certain strength that dignifies and enlarges the intellect.

Error |

Victor Hugo

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action.

Error |

Victor Hugo

The daylight of history is merciless; it has the strange and magical quality that, although it is composed of light, and precisely because of this, it casts shadows where once only brilliance was to be seen, making of one man two images, each opposed to the other, so that the darkness of the despot counteracts the majesty of the leader. The world arrives at a more balanced judgment.

Error |

Victor Hugo

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.

Error | Truth |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

Having an open heart, do not relish the narrow path of restricted love; love all, do not develop prejudices against men in power or position. They too are our kith and kin. We all sail together.

Error |

Tryon Edwards

Some persons are exaggerators by temperament. - They do not mean untruth, but their feelings are strong, and their imaginations vivid, so that their statements are largely discounted by those of calm judgment and cooler temperament. - They do not realize that "we always weaken what we exaggerate."

Error | Past | Wisdom | Learn |

Tryon Edwards

Indolence is the dry rot of even a good mind and a good character; the practical uselessness of both. - It is the waste of what might be a happy and useful life.

Diligence | Error | Influence | Progress | Skill | Struggle | Will | Wrong |

Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.

To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business and your business in your heart.

Error |

Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz

The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions of his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it; and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.

Error | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose |

Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.

We hear of a silent generation, more concerned with security than integrity, with conforming than performing, with imitating than creating.

Error |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken

Business | Disparagement | Error | Experience | History | Hope | Influence | Justice | Love | Mankind | Nations | People | Service | Will | World | Business |

Hugh Blair

Pride fills the world with harshness and severity; we are rigorous to offences as if we had never offended.

Error |

William Shakespeare

Ah, she doth teach the torches to burn bright, it seems she hangs against the cheek of night like a rich jewel from an Ethiope's ear, beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.

Error | Fault | History | Fault |