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

Thurgood Marshall

Customary greeting to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, “What's shaking, chiefy baby?”

Energy | Feelings | Heart | People | Words |

Tibetan Proverbs

A braggart has no courage, muddy water has no depth.

Energy | Feelings | Heart | People | Will | Words |

Tibetan Proverbs

If there is only one earring among seven daughters, there will always be a quarrel on festival days.

Time | Waste |

Tom Butler-Bowdon

Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying.

Feelings | Influence | Pain | Pleasure |

William Shakespeare

Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son? 'Tis full three months since I did see him last.

Desire | Modesty | Sense | Waste |

William Godwin

It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.

Absolute | Action | Feelings | Impression | Judgment | Man | Reason | Sacred | Sense | Understanding | Intellect |

William Shakespeare

Come, give us a taste of your quality.

Looks | Time | Trifles | Waste |

William Shakespeare

Come, we have a hot venison pasty to dinner. I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here. All’s Well That Ends Well, Act iv, Scene 3

Delay | Waste |

William James

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.

Criticism | Darkness | Feelings | Ideas | Right |

William James

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Conduct | Day | Feelings | Ideas | Indispensable | Life | Life | Phenomena | Religion | Theories | Thought | Thought |

William Havard

Who shall tax successful villainy, or call the rising traitor to account?

Waste | Guilty |

William James

Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.

Doctrine | Feelings | Think |

William Godwin

There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape.

Art | Feelings | Friend | Heart | Justice | Kindness | Man | Object | Politics | Practice | Present | Reserve | Will | World | Art |

William Law

Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world: It is not he who prays most or fasts most, it is not he who gives most alms or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice; but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.

Death | Delusion | Desire | Eternal | Faith | Life | Life | Love | Nothing | Waste | Will | Zeal |

William James

The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not someday feel that is it worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark until the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.

Better | Feelings | Glory | Ideals | Nations | Politics | Shame | War | Vicissitudes |

William Law

Never do anything through strife, or emulation, or vainglory. Never do anything in order to excel other people, but in order to please God, and because it is His will that you should do everything in the best manner that you can.

Waste |

William Law

He that seeks God in everything is sure to find God in everything. When we thus live wholly unto God, God is wholly ours and we are then happy in all the happiness of God; for by uniting with Him in heart, and will, and spirit, we are united to all that He is and has in Himself. This is the purity and perfection of life that we pray for in the Lord's Prayer, that God's kingdom may come and His will be done in us, as it is in Heaven. And this we may be sure is not only necessary, but attainable by us.

Charity | Money | Pride | Waste | Will |

William James

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.

Absolute | Ambition | Blush | Education | Feelings | Honor | Individual | Men | Pride | Question | Race | Reason | Right | Shame | System | Time | Worth | Ambition | Old |

William Morris

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

Waste | Child |

Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.

Earth | Feelings | Imagination | People | Thinking | Thought | Parent | Thought |