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

Elizabeth Gilbert

There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.

Belief | Books | Care | Decision | Destiny | Divinity | Faith | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Reason | Religion | Scripture | Will | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

Books | Fun | Waiting |

Elizabeth Gilbert

The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm.

Health | Individual |

Elizabeth Lesser

Are you becoming more and more aware of the interconnection of all beings, creatures and elements? Do you hold as your own Jesus' words: 'And whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me'? Are you getting tired of the way our society celebrates the false ego's selfish and insatiable drive to acquire and use more and more? And does that make you want to be an agent of healing? A declaration of life's interdependence is a sign of spiritual progress.

Arrogance | Fear | Fighting | Health | Life | Life | Listening | Nature | Practice | Soul | Surrender | Uncertainty | Will |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west.

Better | Books | Looks | Love | Story | Will | Writing |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous. So I decided to study Greek and learn to manage a horse.

Health | Suffering | Think |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he cannot bear her burdens.

Books | History | Nothing | Teach |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

What availeth wit when it fails the owner at greatest need?

Body | Family | Good | Health |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.

Books | Discovery | Teach | Universe | Discovery |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.

Books | Teach | Universe |

Emil M. Cioran

Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.

Disease |

Dorothy Parker

I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

Books | Men | Woman |

Dorothy Parker

You think you're frightening me with your hell, don't you? You think Yyur hell is worse than mine.

Books | Giving | Literature | Present | Trial |

Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

Only they have to weep bitter tears who know what has come to them is the result of their foolish conduct, their ignorant way, their want of proper understanding of life and what love means.

Books | Character | Common Sense | Force | Righteousness | Rites | Salvation | Sense | System | World | Happiness |

Dorothy Parker

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.

Books |

Dorothy Parker

Little Words when you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; and I can only stare, and shape my grief in little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown the bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, no beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, can spell them out.

Better | Blame | Books | Force |

Emil M. Cioran

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Disease |

Dorothy Parker

I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that anymore.

Books | Love | People | Think |

Emile Zola

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!

Absolute | Beginning | Disease | Eternal | Religion | Science | Old | Understand |

Emil M. Cioran

Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to scape that awakening...

Books |