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

John Ruskin

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Books | Life | Life | Quiet | Reading | Waste |

Lillian Hellman, fully Lillian Florience "Lily" Hellman

God helps all the children as they move into a time of life they do not understand and must struggle through with precepts they have picked from the garbage can of older people, clinging with the passion of the lost to odds and ends that will mess them up for all time, or hating the trash so much they will waste their future on the hatred.

Children | Ends | Future | God | Life | Life | Passion | People | Struggle | Time | Waste | Will | Understand |

Lord Fisher, aka Lord John Arbutnoth Fisher, fully Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot "Jacky" Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher of Kilverstone

Acquire good physique and mental robustness which comes from fresh air, sound and plain food, constant and compelling attention to waste matter, proper and peaceful sleep, and concentration on true religion, ethics, art and literature.

Art | Attention | Ethics | Good | Literature | Religion | Sound | Waste | Art |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and some absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Day | Doubt | Good | Nonsense | Spirit | Tomorrow | Waste | Old |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess,, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often waste its efforts in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

Education | Thought | Time | Waste |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don’t waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.

Life | Life | Right | Waste | Will | Work |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on yesterdays.

Day | Doubt | Good | Nonsense | Spirit | Tomorrow | Waste | Old |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Day | Doubt | Good | Nonsense | Spirit | Tomorrow | Waste | Old |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't waste your life in doubts and fears: spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.

Life | Life | Right | Waste | Will | Work |

Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an

Emptiness here, Emptiness thee, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes. Infinitely large and infinitely small; no difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen. So too with Being and Non-Being. Don’t waste time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this.

Nothing | Time | Universe | Waste |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people we have the right and the duty, second to moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.

Change | Children | Duty | Future | Good | Individual | Justice | Law | Moral law | Past | People | Present | Right | Time | Waste |

William Shakespeare

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; for now hath time made me his numbering clock: my thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, whereto my finger, like a dial's point, is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is are clamorous goans, which strike upon my heart, which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans show minutes, times, and hours. Richard III, Act v, Scene 5

Sound | Tears | Time | Waste |

William Shakespeare

How sour sweet music is, when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives, and here have I the daintiness of ear to check time broke in a disordered string; but for the concord of my state and time had not an ear to hear my true time broke. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; for now hath Time made me his numbering clock. My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, whereto my finger, like a dial's point, is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart, which is the bell. Richard II, Act v, Scene 5

Men | Music | Sound | Time | Waste |

Edward de Bono

Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple.

Attention | Justification | Waste |

Freeman John Dyson

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

Waste |

Frank Barron

To wish you were someone else is to waste the person you are.

Waste |

Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?

Authority | Global | Hunger | Man | Rights | System | Waste | Wealth | Woman | Child |

Florence Nightingale

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Feelings | Waste | Think |

George Washington

For the sake of humanity, it is devoutly to be wished that the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefit of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into ploughshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and, as the Scriptures express it, "the nations learn war no more."

Nations | Rage | War | Waste | Learn |

H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

There has been ... an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems.

Education | Inevitable | Past | Waste | World | Old |