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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Luxury is a remedy much worse than the disease it sets up to cure; or rather it is in itself the greatness of all evils; for every State, great or small: for, in order to maintain all the servants and vagabonds it creates, it brings oppression and ruin on the citizen and the laborer; it is like those scorching winds, which, covering the trees and plants with their devouring insects, deprive useful animals of their subsistence and spread famine and death wherever they blow.

Character | Death | Disease | Greatness | Luxury | Oppression | Order |

George Ripley

To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.

Character | Happy | Self | Child |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is then certain that compassion is a natural feeling, which, by moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species.

Character | Compassion | Individual | Love | Self |

Charles A. Reich

To start from self does not mean to be selfish. It means to start from premises based on human life and the rest of nature, rather than premises that are the artificial products of the Corporate State, such as power or status. It is not an ‘ego trip’ but a radical subjectivity designed to find genuine values in a world whose official values are false and distorted. It is not egocentricity, but honesty, wholeness, genuineness in all things. It starts from self because human life is found as individual units, not as corporations and institutions; its intent is to start from life.

Character | Ego | Honesty | Individual | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Power | Rest | Self | Wholeness | World |

Nancy Reagan, born Anne Frances Robbins

Love means giving one’s self to another person fully, not just physically. When two people really love each other, this helps them to stay alive and grow. One must be loved to grow. Love’s such a precious and fragile thing that when it comes we have to hold on tightly. And when it comes, we’re very lucky because for some it never comes at all. If you have love, you’re wealthy in a way that can never be measured.

Character | Giving | Love | Means | People | Self |

Sydney Smith

That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward.

Better | Character | Charity | Duty | Future | God | Hope | Ingratitude | Labor | Looks | Man | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Work | World | God |

Charles Simmons

Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Character | Greatness | Life | Life | Little | Wisdom |

O. Carl Simonton

The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be.

Character | Children | Experience | Health | Land | Love | Men | Self | Wisdom |

Charles Simmons

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Character | Greatness | Little |

Gordon Van Sauter

Never allow your sense of self to become associated with your sense of job. If your job vanishes your self doesn’t.

Character | Self | Sense |

Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

It is rascally to steal a purse, daring to steal a million, and proof of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases.

Blame | Character | Daring | Greatness | Guilt |

Charles Simmons

Immortality is the greatness of our being; the scene for attaining the fullness and perfection of our existence.

Character | Existence | Greatness | Immortality | Perfection |

Alexander Smith

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human [mortal] life.

Character | Life | Life | Mortal | Trifles | Happiness |

Alexander Smith

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.

Character | Life | Life | Mortal | Trifles | Happiness |

Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

It is the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a good self examiner.

Character | Good | Self | World |