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

Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

Disease | Tyranny | Unique |

Horace Mann

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Books | Children | Excitement | Family | Knowledge | Love | Man | Means | Mind | Reading | Right | Wrong | Learn |

Hosea Ballou

It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.

Better | Books |

Jack Kornfield

Does the world need more medicine and energy and buildings and food? No. There is enough food and medicine, there are enough resources for all. There is starvation and poverty and widespread disease because of human ignorance, prejudice, and fear. Out of greed and hatred we hoard materials; we create wars over imaginary geographic boundaries and act as if one group of people is truly different from another group somewhere else on the planet.

Disease | Energy | Enough | Fear | Greed | Ignorance | Need | People | Poverty | Prejudice | World |

James Bryant Conant

No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

Disease | Health |

Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

Sleep, riches, and health - to be truly enjoyed, must be interrupted.

Health | Riches |

James Martineau

The health of a community, is an almost unfailing index of its morals.

Health |

John Burroughs

I still find each day too short for all thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. The longer I lie the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and wonder of the world.

Beauty | Books | Day | Mind | Wonder | World | Beauty | Friends |

Joseph Addison

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated; by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.

Body | Health | Mind | Reading | Virtue | Virtue |

Joseph Addison

A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us, and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us without.

Body | Conscience | Good | Health | Serenity | Soul |

Joseph Addison

The jealous man’s disease is of so malignant a nature that it converts all it takes into its own nourishment.

Disease | Man | Nature |

Jon Kabat-Zinn

What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings.

Body | Feelings | Health | Life | Life | Mind | Trust |

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Daring | Disease | Loneliness | People |

Lin Yutang

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Books | Life | Life | Man | Wise |

Lin Yutang

Art should be a satire and a warning against our paralyzed emotions, our devitalized thinking and our denaturalized living. It teaches us unsophistication in a sophisticated world. It should restore to us health and sanity caused by too much mental activity. It should sharpen our senses, re-establish the connection between our reason and our human nature, and assemble the ruined parts of a dislocated life again into a whole, by restoring our original nature.

Art | Emotions | Health | Human nature | Life | Life | Nature | Reason | Sanity | Satire | Thinking | Warning | World |

Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin

Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks ... We learned to do what only the students of nature ever learn, and that was to feel beauty.

Beauty | Books | Knowledge | Nature | World |

Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis

You cannot eradicate disease from the human body unless you eradicate it from the body politic.

Body | Disease |

Lewis Thomas

We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health and longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.

Better | Culture | Health | Hope | Leisure | Need | Science | Survival | Technology | Wisdom |