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

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

The assistance you need will be provided by the universe as soon as you convert your readiness to willingness.

Mistake | Right |

Wendell Berry

It is possible, I think, to say that... agriculture formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.

Business | Failure | Faith | Greed | History | Hope | Indignation | Land | Life | Life | Obligation | People | Present | Right | Study | Failure | Business |

Wendell Berry

While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish.

Conservation | Difficulty | Discipline | Government | Man | Mistake | Nothing | Peace | Understanding | Will | Work | Worth | Government |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.

Mistake |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

John, she said, does it make every one unhappy when they study and learn lots of things. He paused and smiled. I am afraid it does, he said. And, John, are you glad you studied? Yes, came the answer, slowly but positively. She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, I wish I was unhappy,—and—and, putting both arms about his neck, I think I am, a little, John.

Beauty | Heart | Life | Life | Longing | Mistake | Music | Sorrow | Talking | Time | Vision | World | Beauty |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.

Action | Deeds | Men | Mistake | Poetry | Time | World | Deeds |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

Mistake |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

Perhaps, to the uninformed, it may appear unaccountable that a man should be able to retain in his memory such a variety of learning; but the close alliance with each other, of the different branches of science, will explain the difficulty.

Care | Fear | Future | Need | Obligation | Posterity | Public | Will | Work |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note - and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

Mistake | Music | Tomorrow | Wrong |

Vimala Thakar

All our emotions and thoughts are conditioned reflexes, reactions.

Action | Authority | Care | Ego | Insecurity | Insult | Intelligence | Learning | Little | Mistake | Respect | Right | Silence | Time | Understanding | World | Insult | Respect | Afraid | Learn |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

Mistake | People | World | Happiness | Think |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.

Good | Literature | Mistake | Reading | Writing | Think |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

It is a true miracle when a man finally sees himself as his only opposition.

Light | Mistake | Will | Think |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

It is not a disaster to discover that you are not the person you assumed you were. To the contrary, it is the beginning of the end of disaster. Experiment: How you feel if you were neither a success or failure in life? How would you feel if you were neither popular nor unwanted?

Mistake | Sense |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

The leap is made by dropping vanity over knowledge and by a willingness to become nothing in order to become everything.

Earth | Failure | Mistake | Nothing | Plan | Will | Failure |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

The real prize is never delivered by memory or by imagination, but by something above them.

Mistake | Past | Power | Present |

Victor Hugo

What matters deafness of the ears when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.

Mistake | World |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The hypocritical and the greedy are struck down; the Messenger of Death punishes them with his club. O camel-like mind, you are my breath of life; rid yourself of the pollution of hypocrisy and doubt.

Family | Husband | Obligation |

Václav Havel

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge.

Blame | Democracy | Duty | Freedom | Government | Obligation | Responsibility | Sin | Will | Wrong | Government | Understand |

Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

Don't be deceived. You must face Destiny. Preparation is only possible now. Don't be fooled by your sunny skies. When the rains descend and the floods come and the winds blow and beat upon your house, your private dwelling, your own family, your own fair hopes, your own strong muscles, your own body, your own soul itself, then it is well-nigh too late to build a house. You can only go inside what house you have and pray that it is founded upon the Rock. Be not deceived by distance in time or space, or the false security of a bank account and an automobile and good health and willing hands to work. Thousands, perhaps millions as good as you have had all these things and are perishing in body and, worse still, in soul today.

Consciousness | Contrast | Glory | God | Life | Life | Listening | Mistake | Obedience | People | Struggle | Vision | Will | Wills | God |