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

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

The really irreparable loss is that of desires.

Man |

Eudora Welty

Henry James said there isn't any difference between the English novel and the American novel since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

Will |

Eugene Peterson

If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like spiritual direction? Why not just friend?

News | Teach | Will |

Eugene Peterson

We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God sticks with us.

Birth | Death | Understanding | Will |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

When money represents so many things, not to love it would be to love nearly nothing. To forget true needs can be only a weak moderation; but to know the value of money and to sacrifice it always, maybe to duty, maybe even to delicacy,—that is real virtue.

Man | Woman |

Eudora Welty

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

Enough | Imagination | Little | People | Praise | Wonder | Blessed |

Eugene Peterson

Forgiveness is the last word. I take no interest in eliminating the tension between justice and forgiveness by taking justice off the table.

Attention | Focus | People | Will | World | Wrong |

Eugene Peterson

I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues.

Expectation | God | Illusion | Imagination | Meaning | Means | Will | Work | God | Expectation |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

When words were become the most natural signs of our ideas, the necessity of arranging them in an order so contrary to that which at present prevails, was no longer the fame. And yet they continued to do it, because the character of languages, having been framed from this necessity, did not permit any change. to be made in this custom; neither did they begin to draw near to our manner of conceiving, till after a long succession of idioms.

Habit | Imagination | Regard |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

The means expeditious not occur as the work of a day.

Man |

Eugene Peterson

I haven't made that decision. But I would certainly welcome the superintendent of schools, instead of pointing the finger at everybody and everything, taking some accountability of what is happening on his watch.

Law | Will |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

A man's work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself . . . so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe.

Absurd | Enough | Faith | Life | Life | Truth | Trial |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation. As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt.

Man |

Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

In 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others.

Hope | Judgment | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death

Advice | Will |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like all other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. The Illinois Central Railroad Company selected the site upon which the city is built and this consisted of a vast miasmatic swamp far better suited to mosquito culture than for human beings. From the day the site was chosen by (and of course in the interest of all) said railway company, everything that entered into the building of the town and the development of the city was determined purely from profit considerations and without the remotest concern for the health and comfort of the human beings who were to live there, especially those who had to do all the labor and produce all the wealth.

Time | Will |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

Child labor must be abolished by the working class.

Better | Comfort | Culture | Day | Health | Labor |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The very moment a workingman begins to do his own thinking he understands the paramount issue, parts company with the capitalist politician and falls in line with his own class on the political battlefield.

Problems | Will |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

Death | Equanimity | Eternal | Evil | Fear | Grace | Life | Life | Men | Reward | Will |