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 James

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

Change | Education | Mind | Need | Science | Sin | Struggle |

William James

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.

Education | Good | Man | Teach |

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

No vice can harbor in you, no infirmity take any root, no good desire can languish, when once your heart is in this method of prayer; never beginning to pray, till you first see how matters stand with you; asking your heart what it wants, and having nothing in your prayers, but what the known state of your heart puts you upon demanding, saying, or offering, unto God. A quarter of an hour of this prayer, brings you out of your closet a new man; your heart feels the good of it; and every return of such a prayer, gives new life and growth to all your virtues, with more certainty, than the dew refreshes the herbs of the field: whereas, overlooking this true prayer of your own heart, and only at certain times taking a prayer that you find in a book, you have nothing to wonder at, if you are every day praying, and yet every day sinking further and further under all your infirmities.

Education | Modesty |

William James

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Consciousness | Education | Life | Life | Meaning | Present | World |

William James

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

Education | Failure | Ideas | Means | Mind | Nothing | Failure | Vicissitudes |

William James

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.

Absolute | Ambition | Blush | Education | Feelings | Honor | Individual | Men | Pride | Question | Race | Reason | Right | Shame | System | Time | Worth | Ambition | Old |

William Morris

I half wish that I had not been born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age.

Art | Education | Freedom | Art |

Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

Now For self-culture nothing equals respect for others. To counteract firmness nothing equals compliance. Consequently it can be said that the Way of respect and acquiescence is woman's most important principle of conduct. So respect may be defined as nothing other than holding on to that which is permanent; and acquiescence nothing other than being liberal and generous. Those who are steadfast in devotion know that they should stay in their proper places; those who are liberal and generous esteem others, and honor and serve chem.

Age | Authority | Books | Boys | Children | Conduct | Education | Men | Present | Relationship | Rites | Rule | Study | Teach | Understand |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.

Education |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe - the open sesame to every soul.

Education |

Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key

Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

Education |

Eric S. Raymond

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

Education | Science |

Ernest Madu

We in the US can learn a good deal from studying those who achieve great things without having huge resources. this video is a strong statement against the mistake of Big Government thinking. imagine the access to health care we could achieve if we simply stepped back from our current unthinking debates and refactored the broken system.

Education |

Evgeny Morozov

The use of text messaging for propaganda purposes – known as “red-texting” – reveals another creative streak among China’s propaganda virtuosos. The practice may have grown out of a competition organized by one of China’s mobile phone operators to compose the most eloquent Party-admiring text message. Fast forward a few years, and senior telecom officials in Beijing are already busily attending “red-texting” symposia. “I really like these words of Chairman Mao: ‘The world is ours, we should unite for achievements. Responsibility and seriousness can conquer the world and the Chinese Communist Party members represent these qualities.’ These words are incisive and inspirational.” This is a text message that thirteen million mobile phone users in the Chinese city of Chongqing received one day in April 2009. Sent by Bo Xilai, the aggressive secretary of the city’s Communist Party who is speculated to have strong ambitions for a future in national politics, the messages were then forwarded another sixteen millions times. Not so bad for an odd quote from a long-dead Communist dictator.

Care | Corruption | Darkness | Education | Efficiency | Fear | Government | Justice | Model | Preference | Reading | Receive | Government |

Fenwicke Lindsay Holmes

The greatest power in the world is the power our thought, for it is Creative Mind in action.

Education | History | Sense | Skepticism |

Ernest Becker

Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Body | Death | Education | Man | Means | Mistake | Taste | Will | Child |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Before we can talk about giving aid, we must have something to give. We do not have thousands of poverty-stricken villages in our country; so what do we know about effective methods of self-help in such circumstances?

Doubt | Education | Little | Mankind | Mortal |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

What we have today, in modern industrial society, is not romantic and certainly not utopianÂ…But it is in very deep trouble and holds no promise of survival. We jolly well have to have the courage to dream if we want to survive and give our children a chance of survival.

Education | Metaphysics | Present | Soul | World | Understand |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

We see that man entirely resembles the higher mammals, and most of all the apes, in embryonic development as well as in anatomic structure. And if we seek to understand this ontogenetic agreement in the light of the biogenetic law, we find that it proves clearly and necessarily the descent of man from a series of other mammals, and proximately from the primates.

Church | Education | Existence | Important | Influence | Need | Order | Public |