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

Sei Shōnagon

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

Feelings |

Sei Shōnagon

One has carefully scented a robe and then forgotten about it for several days. When finally one comes to wear it, the aroma is even more delicious than on freshly scented clothes.

Comfort | Feelings | Joy | Wants |

Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL

He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

Feelings | Present | Soul |

Eileen Garrett

The language of symbol and dream is the route to the unconscious whole. Within these two facets of mind we must look if we would find security. This has been the route specifically human, the dual level contained within the universal concept of being. It has been mostly a foreign language, but in recent decades we have grown to comprehend that if we could remember the past, we could find the conception of a future which is daily being unfolded.

Feelings | Language | Myth | Space | Survival | Time |

Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown

I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.

Conversation | Dreams | Feelings | Parents | Child | Old |

Elizabeth Gilbert

For myself I have a history of speeding decision-making with regard to men. I always fall in love quickly and without risk assessment. I tend to not only see the best in everyone, but to assume that all emotionally able to reach their highest potential. Innumerable times I fell into the highest potential of a man, instead of himself, and long maintained that connection waiting for him to realize his own size. In many relationships I have been a victim of his own optimism.

Feelings |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing, you work hard, then you die with nothing. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old.

Feelings | Opinion | Universe | Will |

Elizabeth Gilbert

This is what we are like. Collectively as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost 100 years old, and she told me, There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering.

Ceremony | Culture | Feelings | Joy | Need | Order | Safe | Tradition |

Elizabeth Gilbert

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

Feelings | Think |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

You may not understand why He leads you now in this way and now in that, but you may, nay, you must believe that perfection is stamped on His every act.

Feelings | God | Love | Nothing | Pleasure | God |

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

It is easy to be pleasant when life flows by like a song, but the man worthwhile is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong. For the test of the heart is trouble, and it always comes with years, and the smile that is worth the praises of earth is the smile that shines through the tears.

Fate | Riches | Waste | Wealth | Riches | Fate |

Ellen Goodman

The people often slandered as greedy geezers seem to have a perspective from their place in history. The elders in my family remember the Depression. The baby boomers remember dot-com boom and bust. We all have albums of best laid plans.

Feelings | Regard | Regret |

Emile Zola

He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes.

Distinguish | Family | Waste |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

There is not room for Death, nor atom that his might could render void: Thou - Thou art Being and Breath, and what Thou art may never be destroyed.

Acquaintance | Care | Feelings | Nothing | Wrong |

Emmet Fox

When we remember that God really is omnipotent, untrammeled by what we call time or space or matter, or the vagaries of human nature, it is easy to see that there can be no limit to the power of prayer. You can pray about a problem and solve it at any stage, but of course the earlier you tackle it the easier your work will be.

Change | Conduct | Convictions | Day | Destiny | Experience | Feelings | Life | Life | Pious | Story | Think |

Emma Goldman

The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every indignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.

Energy | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Peace | War | Waste |

Erskine Mason

And now, if you still press the question, why should God make provision for forgiveness, to an extent he knew would be unnecessary, and be guilty of an expenditure of means beyond what the well-known circumstances of the case required, We answer, by referring you to the characteristic of universality, to which we have already adverted, as marking his dispensations in the natural world, and ask you why his sun shines and wastes its beams upon sightless eye-balls, or upon those who will not open their eyes to behold his goodly rays? Why does he send his rains upon the barren rock, or waste his showers upon the sandy and sterile soil, in which the seed can never vegetate? If I propose this question, you tell me in reply, that I mistake altogether the nature of God’s creations, and the general principles of the system which he has established. You tell me that the necessity for the sun being what it is, does not depend upon the number of the persons who are to be enlightened by his rays, but grows out of the fact that it must be what it is to give light to any one–that atmospheric laws are general, and cannot in their nature be so arranged as to secure the descent of rain only where it will render the earth productive. You cannot consider that there is any waste of light or moisture, because there are some who do not see, or because in some places the surface of the earth presents the impervious rock to the rains of heaven.

Diligence | Giving | God | Sabbath | Truth | Waste | Will | Words | God |