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

Ernest Becker

The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

Ability | Character | Consciousness | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Terror | World |

Ernest Becker

In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not.

Ability | Character | Comfort | Consciousness | Defense | Fear | God | Ideas | Joy | Madness | Man | Meaning | Means | Men | People | Promise | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Wants | God | Thought |

Ernest Becker

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

Enough | Important | Life | Life | People | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

Enough | Intelligence | Strength |

Ernest Becker

The first thing we have to do with heroism is to lay bare its under­side, show what gives human heroics its specific nature and impetus. Here we introduce directly one of the great rediscoveries of modern thought: that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death. After Darwin the problem of death as an evolutionary one came to the fore, and many thinkers immediately saw that it was a major psychological problem for man.2 They also very quickly saw what real heroism was about, as Shaler wrote just at the turn of the century:3 heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of specifically human evolution. But even before that our primate ancestors deferred to others who were extrapowerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly. Man has elevated animal courage into a cult.

God | Problems | God |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.

Father |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Oh Jake, Brett said, We could have had such a damned good time together. Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes, I said. Isn't it pretty to think so?

Father |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Cowardice | Failure | Good | Reason | Failure |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.

Absolute | Father |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.

Father |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach. It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting at the edge of the Stream, and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.

Politics |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

Children | Enough | Good | Men | People | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

Choice | Man | People | Strength | Old |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

To mention these things, no doubt, means laying oneself open to the charge of being against science, technology, and progress. Let me therefore, in conclusion, add a few words about future scientific research. Man cannot live without science and technology any more than he can live against nature.

Better | Experience | Nothing | Problems | Question | Technology | World |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

All history – as well as all current experience – points to the fact that it is man, not nature, who provides the primary resource: that the key factor of all economic development comes out of the mind of man.

Technology |

Erwin Rommel, fully Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel

The future battle on the ground will be preceded by battle in the air. This will determine which of the contestants has to suffer operational and tactical disadvantages and be forced throughout the battle into adoption compromise solutions.

Art | Enemy | Strength | Time | Art |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.

Circumstances | Famous | Father | Hunger | Important | Time | Loss | Child |

Ernest Shurtleff Holmes

The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does.

Human race | Race |