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

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To serve God is not to pass our lives on our knees in prayer; it is to discharge on earth those obligations which our duty requires.

Character | Duty | Earth | God | Prayer | God |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The fundamental principle of all morals, on the basis of which I have reasoned in all my writings... is that man is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is absolutely no original perversity in the human heart, and that the first movements of nature are always right.

Character | Good | Heart | Justice | Man | Nature | Order | Right |

Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways.

Body | Character | Earth | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul |

Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, to harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world - that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all round me - is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.

Character | Destroy | Evil | Good | Harm | Life | Life | Morality | Reverence | Will | World |

Avraham-Haim Shag, born Avraham-Haim Tzvebner

There is no greater fool than one who makes his happiness based on receiving honor and approval. Such a person’s happiness is always in the hands of others... Such a person is dependent on other people his enter life and will frequently suffer humiliation. Only an idiot would knowingly and willingly put himself in a situation where he will constantly be in need of others and will humiliate himself for a dubious and questionable benefit.

Character | Honor | Life | Life | Need | People | Will | Happiness |

Brooke Foss Westcott

No repentance on earth can undo the past.

Character | Earth | Past | Repentance |

Richard Whately

"Honesty is the best policy," but he who acts on that principle is not an honest man.

Character | Honesty | Man | Policy |

Anaximander NULL

(Paraphrase) The principle and element of existing things is the unbounded... and motion is eternal.

Eternal | Wisdom |

Henry Wotton, fully Sir Henry Wotton

Virtue is the roughest way, but proves at night a bed of down.

Character | Virtue | Virtue |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

One universe made up of all that is; and one God in it all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth.

God | Law | Reason | Thinking | Truth | Universe | Wisdom | God |

Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole

I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to life in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not over anxious about your personal place; that makes you tolerant because you realize your own comic fallibility; that gives you tranquillity without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself.

Capacity | Character | Complacency | Consciousness | Earth | Life | Life | Materialism | Tranquility | World | Happiness |