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

Cyrano De Bergerac, Savinien de

The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.

Arrogance | Men | Nature | Wisdom | Think |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Mind | Truth | Wisdom |

Declaration of American Women NULL

Man-made barriers, laws, social customs and prejudices continue to keep a majority of women in an inferior position without full control of our lives and bodies. From infancy throughout life, in personal and public relations, in the family, in the schools, in every occupation and profession, too often we find our individuality, our capabilities, our earning powers diminished by discriminatory practices and outmoded ideas of what a woman is, what a woman can do, and what a woman must be... We lack effective political and economic power We have only minor and insignificant roles in making, interpreting and enforcing our laws, in running our political parties, businesses, unions, schools and institutions, in directing the media, in governing our country, in deciding issues of war or peace. We do not seek special privileges, but we demand as a human right a full voice and role for women in determining the destiny of our world, our nation, our families and our individual lives.

Control | Destiny | Family | Ideas | Individual | Individuality | Infancy | Life | Life | Majority | Man | Occupation | Peace | Position | Power | Public | Right | War | Wisdom | Woman | World |

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.

History | Spirit | Wisdom |

W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon

To strip the human being, for example, of all his attributes save his logical or calculating powers is an unwarrantable mutilation. Nature made him what he is. You cannot pick and choose. Nature is asserting herself in him, and you must take account not of one or two, but of all her assertions.

Example | Nature | Wisdom |

Isak Dinesen, pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon human intercourse.

Time | Truth | Wisdom |

George Douglas Brown, pseud. Kennedy King

Immortality! We bow before the very term. Immortality! Before its reason staggers, calculation reclines her tired head, and imagination folds her weary pinions. Immortality! It throws open the portals of the vast forever; it puts the crown of deathless destiny upon every human brow; it cries to every uncrowned king of men, “Live forever, crowned for the empire of a deathless destiny!”

Destiny | Imagination | Immortality | Men | Reason | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

Reverence | Soul | Trust | Wisdom |

Émile Durkheim, fully David Émile Durkheim

The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social... In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence.

Existence | Individual | Life | Life | Need | Reality | Rites | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors... are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts - in short, the psychological factors - are considered as unimportant and secondary.

Wisdom |

Alice Embree

America’s technology has turned in upon itself; its corporate form makes it the servant of profits, not the servant of human needs.

Technology | Wisdom |

Freeman John Dyson

Science and technology, like all original creations of the human spirit, are unpredictable. If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling with human lives.

Enough | Good | Science | Spirit | Technology | Wisdom |

Maria Edgeworth

The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.

Age | Heart | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

Human nature | Nature | Wisdom |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.

Labor | Life | Life | Pain | Rest | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

True human progress is based less on the inventive mind than on the conscience.

Conscience | Mind | Progress | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

In the first place, the human mind, no matter how highly trained, is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many tongues. The little child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind to God. And because I believe this, I am not an atheist.

Books | God | Little | Mind | Order | Plan | Universe | Wisdom | Child | Understand |

George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Influence | Soul | Wisdom |