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

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect this nation's compassion, unselfish caring, patience, and just plain love for one another.

Ernest Becker

Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nine­teenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primi­tive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reli­gions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Control | Death | Fighting | Good | Health | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Means | Necessity | Need | Play | Question | Reality | Right | Science | Security | Self-deception | Time | Will | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.

Conscience | Time | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

Books | Good |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. ... Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up... To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love.

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good dayÂ’s work.

Books |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I was blown up while we were eating cheese.

Danger | Disease | Fear | Man | Men | Stupidity | Time | Danger | Afraid | Vice |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I thought I had already paid for everything. Not like women who always pay and pay and pay. There is no principle of reward and punishment. Simple exchange of values. You give something and get something in return. Or do you work for something. Either way, you pay for everything that is worth something. I was redeemed your life a lot of things that I liked, and that's why I felt the joy of life. Things that give you joy of preparing, may be paid in several ways - knowledge, experience, exposure or money. To enjoy life, in order to learn about your money and get something nutritious to enjoy it consciously. Generally, it is possible. The world is a good store.

Health | Need | Order | Rest | Work |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Behavior | People | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Books | Boys | Government | Hope | Man | Politics | Will | Government |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though.

Books |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Books |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters' huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

Books |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Health | Mind | Sound | Truth |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

There are always some things which we do for their own sakes, and there are other things which we do for some other purpose. One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-to-ends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and argument about this.

Health | Nature | Will | Crisis |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The point is that the real strength of the theory of private enterprise lies in this ruthless simplification, which fits so admirably also into the mental patterns created by the phenomenal successes of science.

Disease | Research | Wisdom |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

It is clear that the "rich" are in the process of stripping the world of its once-for-all endowment of relatively cheap and simple fuels. It is their continuing economic growth which produces ever more exorbitant demands, with the result that the world's cheap and simple fuels could easily become dear and scare long before the poor countries had acquired the wealth, education, industrial sophistication, and power of capital accumulation needed for the application of alternative fuels on any significant scale.

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty - the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

Beauty | Books | Freedom | Joy | Mystery | Need | Beauty |

Eugene Peterson

I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

Books | Choice | Church | Size | Learn |

Eudora Welty

It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

Books | Love | Reading | Story | Time |