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 Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir

We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

Character | Debt | Future | Past |

Susan Fenimore Cooper, fully Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper

What a noble gift to man are the forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe to their beauty and their utility! How pleasantly the shadows of the wood fall upon our heads when we turn from the glitter and turmoil of the world of man!

Admiration | Beauty | Character | Debt | Gratitude | Man | Turmoil | Wisdom | World | Beauty |

Benjamin Franklin

To the generous mind the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when it is not in our power to repay it.

Character | Debt | Gratitude | Mind | Power |

William Graham Sumner

The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poorhouse.

Character | Debt | Men | World |

William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 1st Baron Burghley, also Lord William Cecil Burleigh

Beware of suretyship for thy best friend. He that payeth another man’s debt seeketh his own decay. But if thou canst not otherwise choose, rather lend the money thyself upon good bonds, although thou borrow it; so shalt thou secure thyself, and pleasure thy friend.

Debt | Friend | Good | Man | Money | Pleasure | Wisdom |

William Ralph Inge

The nations which have put mankind most in their debt have been small states - Israel, Athens, Florence, Elizabethan England.

Debt | Mankind | Nations | Wisdom |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

Debt | Prosperity | Wisdom |

Thomas Hobbes

To equal justice appertaineth also the equal imposition of taxes; the equality whereof dependeth not on the equality of riches, but on the equality of the debt that every man oweth to the commonwealth for his defense.

Debt | Defense | Equality | Justice | Man | Riches | Wisdom |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten... America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness - justice.

Debt | Determination | Greatness | History | Indispensable | Justice | Ugly | Will | Wisdom |

George Peabody

Education: a debt due from the present to the future generations.

Debt | Education | Future | Present | Wisdom |

Alfred D'Souza

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But here was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, or a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that this was my life. This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.

Business | Debt | Life | Life | Time | Happiness | Obstacle |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If we meet someone who owes us a debt of gratitude, we remember the fact at once. How often we can meet someone to whom we owe a debt of gratitude without thinking about it at all!

Debt | Gratitude | Thinking |

George Gordon Liddy

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.

Debt | Man | Money |

Mike Pence, formally Michael Richard "Mike" Pence

We have to make sure that a catastrophe of nature does not become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren.

Children | Debt | Nature |

Malaysian Proverbs

One can pay back the gift of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind.

Debt | Gold |

Author Unknown NULL

Worrying is the interest paid on a debt you may not owe.

Debt |

Charles Caleb Colton

If the prodigal quits life in debt to others, the miser quiets is still deeper in debt to himself.

Debt | Life | Life |

Charles Caleb Colton

By paying our other debts, we are equal with all mankind; but in refusing to pay a debt of revenge, we are superior.

Debt | Mankind | Revenge |