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

John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury

Charity should be the habit of our estimates; kindness of our feelings; benevolence of our affections; cheerfulness of our social intercourse; generosity of our living; improvement of our progress; prayer of our desires; fidelity of our sex-examination; being and doing good of our entire life.

Benevolence | Character | Charity | Cheerfulness | Feelings | Fidelity | Generosity | Good | Habit | Improvement | Kindness | Life | Life | Prayer | Progress |

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

Character | Habit | Happy |

Ida Tarbell, fully Ida Minerva Tarbell

Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions. We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war, or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference.

Achievement | Character | Death | Gold | Ideas | Indifference | Industry | Land | Life | Life | Rage | War | World |

S.G. Tallentyre, nom de plume for Evelyn Beatrice Hall

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Character | Death | Right | Will |

H. W. Andrews

While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision.

Action | Better | Consideration | Courage | Decision | Experience | Failure | Fear | Habit | Judgment | Man | Mind | Nothing | Position | Question | Responsibility | Right | Time | Will | Wisdom | Failure |

Lionel Trilling

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have every strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

Character | Consequences | Habit | Meaning | Respect | Thought | Understanding | Respect |

Zeno of Citium NULL

No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil. Caesar - Men believe that willingly which they wish to be true.

Character | Death | Evil | Men |

David Allman

Life is precious to the old person. He is not interested merely in thoughts of yesterday’s good life and tomorrow’s path to the grave. He does not want his later years to be a sentence of solitary confinement in society. Nor does he want them to be a death watch.

Death | Good | Grave | Life | Life | Society | Tomorrow | Wisdom | Old |

Yechiel Michel Tukatinsky

Awareness of the inevitability of death need not cause sadness. Rather we can use it to destroy the common worries about inconsequential aspects of life. Many worries are over matters that have no lasting value. When you overcome worry, your mind will be free to think of your ultimate goals in life.

Awareness | Cause | Character | Death | Destroy | Goals | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Sadness | Will | Worry | Think |

John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent

I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike trust in God.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Character | Charity | Cheerfulness | Conversation | Day | Diligence | Discontent | Fidelity | God | Habit | Life | Life | Magnanimity | Self | Service | Silence | Thought | Trust | Will | Thought |

Daniel Webster

Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.

Character | Children | Control | Evil | Future | Habit | Passion | Prejudice | Self | Self-control | Society | Will |

Freddy Arevalo, aka Don Valerio Cohaila

I am a particle of this organism called the earth... Life is because life must be... Life and death are cosmic breath... Each person designs his own destiny... The purpose of life is to continue developing consciousness.

Consciousness | Death | Destiny | Earth | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Philosophy... consists in keeping the demon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor feeling the need of another man’s doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind.

Death | Man | Mind | Need | Nothing | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Waiting | Wisdom |

Yechiel Michel Tukatinsky

The physical loss is not sufficient for mourning. Purely on a physical level what would a person gain if he lived many more years? What is the ultimate gain in devouring hundreds more chickens and thousands more loaves of bread? What is the overall difference if the deceased left all this to others? The Torah obligates us to mourn to emphasize the loss of the true value of life; which is the spiritual elevation a person could have gained if he were still alive. The Almighty placed him on this earth for this purpose. The person’s death should remind the mourners to fill their lives with the spiritual growth that they are capable of.

Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Life | Life | Mourn | Mourning | Purpose | Purpose | Loss | Torah | Value |

Paul Tyner

The absolute demonstration of man’s mastery of fate and command of all condition - the victory of man - all men in this racial man, this elder brother of mankind in his triumph over sin, fear and death! But one thing had remained in my mind as necessary to prove to the mass of men to-day man’s absolute supremacy over death in all its forms as an attribute of his oneness with God, with Eternal Life, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice, Omniscience and Omnipotence.

Absolute | Character | Day | Death | Eternal | Fate | Fear | God | Justice | Life | Life | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Mind | Omnipotence | Omniscience | Oneness | Sin | Fate |