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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race.

Comfort | Gold | Human race | Labor | Man | Race | Wealth | World |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.

Labor | Man | Nature | Patience | Promptness | Property | Right | Thought | Thought |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One must be an inventor to read well... There is creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Invention | Labor | Mind | Reading | Sense | World | Writing |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor or difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must make painful corrections and keep vigilant eye on many sources of error.

Difficulty | Error | Labor | Light | Man | Men | Thought |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man was born to be rich, or grows rich by the use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.

Labor | Man | Nature | Patience | Promptness | Property | Right | Thought | Thought |

Saint Francis de Sales NULL

Labor, as well as fasting, serves to mortify and subdue the flesh. Provided the labor you undertake contributes to the glory of God and your own welfare, I would prefer that you should suffer the pain of labor rather than that of fasting.

Glory | God | Labor | Pain | God |

Saint Benedict of Nursia NULL

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.

Enemy | Idleness | Labor | Soul |

Samuel Gompers

The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce. You can’t weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig iron.

Commerce | Labor | Man | Soul |

Sophocles NULL

Without labor nothing prospers.

Labor | Nothing |

Thomas Fuller

Bear patiently with the Defects of others, and labor to amend thy own.

Defects | Labor |

Thomas Carlyle

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness; he has a life purpose. Labor is life. From the heart of the worker rises the celestial force, breathed into him by Almighty God, awakening him to all nobleness, to all knowledge. Has thou valued patience, courage, openness to light, or readiness to own thy mistakes. In wrestling with the dim, brute powers of Fact, thou wilt continually learn. For every noble work, the possibilities are diffused through immensity - undiscoverable, except to Faith.

Awakening | Blessedness | Courage | Faith | Force | God | Heart | Knowledge | Labor | Life | Life | Light | Openness | Patience | Purpose | Purpose | Work |

Thomas Carlyle

Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own. A greater vividness and permanency of impression is secured, and facts thus acquired become registered in the mind in a way that mere imparted information can never produce.

Impression | Knowledge | Labor | Mind | Property |

Shneur Zalman of Liadi

The era of Moshiach is the fulfillment and culmination of the creation of the world, for which purpose it was originally created. Something of this revelation has been experienced once before on earth, at the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai [when] "To you it has been shown, to know that the L-rd is G‑d; there is none else beside Him" (Deuteronomy 4:35). G‑dliness was then perceived with physical vision.... Subsquently, however, sin coarsened both them and the world - until the era of Moshiach, when the physicality of the body and the world will be refined, and we will be able to apprehend the revealed Divine light which will shine forth to Israel by means of the Torah.... "The glory of G‑d will be revealed; and all flesh will see that the mouth of G‑d has spoken" (Isaiah 40:5)... This all depends on our deeds and labor throughout the duration of the galut... When a person does a mitzvah, he draws down a flow of Divine light into the world, to be suffused and integrated into the material reality.

Body | Deeds | Era | Fulfillment | Giving | Glory | Labor | Light | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Revelation | Sin | Will | World | Deeds | Torah |

Friedrich Engels

What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.

Doctrine | Existence | Labor | Life | Life | Proletariat | Society | Society |

George Washington Carver

The virgin fertility of our soils and the vast amount of unskilled labor have been more of a curse than a blessing to agriculture. This exhaustive system for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our agricultural problem one requiring more brains than of the North, East or West.

Labor | Organic | System |

Gustavo Gutiérrez

But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.

Existence | Labor | Poverty | System |

Horace Greeley

Where Labor stands idle ... there is a demonstrated deficiency, not of Capital, but of brains.

Labor |

Immanual Hermann Fichte

Here below is not the land of happiness; it is only the land of toil; and every joy which comes to us is only to strengthen us for some greater labor that is to succeed.

Joy | Labor | Land |