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

Brian Adam

Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Art | Character | Confidence | Decisiveness | Discipline | Failure | Fear | Impatience | Patience | Success | Wisdom | Art |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable.

Character | Impatience | Men | People | Time | Unhappiness |

Alexander Maclaren

Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction.

Care | God | Impatience | Impulse | Wills | Wisdom | God |

Sylvain Maréchal

Love is like a charming romance which is read with avidity, and often with such impatience that many pages are skipped to reach the denouement sooner.

Impatience | Love | Romance | Wisdom |

Russian Proverbs

Patience doesn’t always help, but impatience never does.

Impatience | Patience |

Charles Caleb Colton

Patience is the support of weakness; impatience is the ruin of strength.

Impatience | Patience | Strength | Weakness |

Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

Specious words confound virtue, and impatience in small matters may confound great plans.

Impatience | Virtue | Virtue | Words |

Franz Kafka

There are two main human sins from which all others derive: impatience and indolence. Because of impatience they were expelled from Paradise, because of indolence they don't return.

Impatience | Indolence | Paradise |

James Bryant Conant

Patience is the support of weakness; impatience is the ruin of strength.

Impatience | Patience | Strength | Weakness |

John Ruskin

There is a large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

Delay | Impatience | Labor |

Florence Scovel Shinn

Fear and impatience demagnetize. Poise magnetizes.

Impatience |

Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary... and because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is — for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.

Impatience | Individual | Insight | Journey | Knowing | Means | Mind | Nature | Nothing | Wants |

James Keller

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.

Adversity | Impatience | Sentiment |

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein

I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the stand point of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one's own place – that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day.

Duty | Events | Impatience | Man | Present | Will | Understand |

Philip Berrigan

My confusion, egotism, competitiveness, and impatience led to eruptions and quarrels within our community. Feelings were hurt, there were painful silences, bitter recriminations. We were experimenting with human interaction, and we discovered that we were loving, jealous, caring, bossy, cooperative, and competitive. After 23 years of living within community, I'm a good deal mellower. I've discovered something about forgiveness, mercy, and tolerance. Not as much, perhaps as I should have learned, but more than I knew before. I can accept the deficiencies of other people, just as I can live with my own deficiencies, which, believe me, are legion.

Feelings | Good | Impatience |

Saint John of Kronstadt, fully John Il’ich Serguiev, aka Holy Father John of the Kronstadt NULL

God is nearer to us than any man at every time. He is nearer to me than my raiment, nearer than the air or light, nearer than my wife, father, mother, daughter, son, or friend. I live in Him, soul and body. I breathe in Him, think in Him, feel, consider, intend, speak, undertake, work in Him.

Humility | Impatience | Love | Malice | Pride |

Saint Vincent de Paul

You should not open your mouth except to express gratitude for benefits you have received, and never to mention your discontent.

Better | Excess | Impatience | Man | Pride | Think |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

In all pleasure hope is a considerable part.

Attention | Impatience | Time |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

These papers of the day have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes.

Care | Impatience | Little | Will |