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

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

Experience | Mind | Order | Present |

William James

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

Experience | Time | Youth | Youth |

William James

A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.

Day | Doctrine | Enough | Experience | Religion |

William James

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious.

Experience | Opportunity | Resolution |

William James

Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. ... So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.

Experience |

William James

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

Example | Experience | God | Men | Mysticism | Passion | Philosophy | Power | Soul | Unique | God |

William Law

Everything in... nature, is descended out that which is eternal, and stands as a... visible outbirth of it, so when we know how to separate out the grossness, death, and darkness... from it, we find... it in its eternal state.

Evil | Expectation | Experience | God | Nature | Nothing | Opposition | Rebellion | Trust | Will | God | Expectation |

William James

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

Experience |

William James

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

Experience |

William Matthews

If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

Action | Experience | Poetry | Thought | Thought |

William Matthews

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character.

Life | Life | Men | Tragedy |

William James

The opposition between the men who have and the men who are is immemorial.

Experience | Fulfillment |

William James

The sin of Science is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, the tendency to renovate its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors.

Experience | Mystical | Sense |

William James

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

Authority | Enough | Experience | Life | Life | Mystical | Rest | Sense | Will |

William Morris

Join hope to our hope and blend sorrow with sorrow,And seek for men's love in the short days of life.

Experience | Important | Words | Understand |

Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

You know,' he said, sitting back, reflectively, 'it's at times like this that you kind of wonder if it's worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that's been bugging me.

Experience | Learning |

Drew Curtis

Like it or not, we live in a world where people will pay more attention to what a member of a famous boy band says on a technical subject as opposed to real scientists, who in theory should know more about what the hell they are talking about.

Comedy | News |

William Shakespeare

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables—meet it is i set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!

Comedy | Office |

William Shakespeare

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded. My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.

Tragedy |