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

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, yet both actively working together.

Character | Difficulty | People |

Thomas Hobbes

To this war of every man, against every man, this is also consequent that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice, are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his sense, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thing distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it.

Body | Character | Force | Fraud | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Man | Men | Mind | Nothing | Power | Qualities | Right | Sense | Society | Solitude | War | World | Wrong |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What is the true test of character, unless it be its progressive development in the bustle and turmoil, in the action and reaction of daily life?

Action | Character | Life | Life | Turmoil |

Heinrich Heine

Whether a revolution succeeds or miscarries, men of great hearts will always be its victims.

Character | Men | Revolution | Will |

Claude-Adrien Helvétius

The men of sense, the idols of the shallow, are very inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great attention.

Attention | Character | Men | Sense | Sloth |

Samson Raphael Hirsch

In general, one cannot judge the true extent of a person’s fortune by outward appearances. The little a righteous man has may be far better than the noisy abundance in which many lawless delight. The modest possessions of a righteous man make him much happier than the great fortunes of many evildoers about which so much ado is made in the world.

Abundance | Better | Character | Fortune | Little | Man | Possessions | World |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than form principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.

Character | Good | Impulse | Men | Think |

Hugh Reginald Haweis

No hell will frighten men away from sin; no dread of prospective misery; only goodness can cast hell out of any man, and set up the kingdom of heaven within.

Character | Dread | Heaven | Hell | Man | Men | Sin | Will |

Ralph A. Hayward

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you want to receive a great deal, you first have to give a great deal. If each individual will give of himself to whomever he can, wherever he can, in any way that he can, in the long run he will be compensated in the exact proportion he gives.

Action | Character | Individual | Receive | Will | Wisdom |

Heinrich Heine

The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.

Character | Convictions | Men | Past |

Claude-Adrien Helvétius

Of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested; it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they; can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

Avarice | Character | Hate | Men | Nothing |

Claude-Adrien Helvétius

Virtue has many preachers, but few martyrs.

Character | Martyrs | Virtue | Virtue |

Thomas Hobbes

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. God and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs and doctrines of men are different.

Character | Conversation | Evil | God | Good | Mankind | Men | Nothing | Philosophy | Science | Society | Society | God |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.

Beauty | Character | God | Light | Man | Men | Paradise | Peace | World |

William James

Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.

Character | Shame | Thought |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.

Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |

Thomas Jefferson

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Character | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Rights | Sacred | Truths |

Max Horkheimer

Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die.

Action | Better | Character | Good | Immortality | Life | Life | Martyrs | Men | Patience | Struggle | Will | World | Happiness |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates.

Character | Good | Means | Men | Reason | Religion | Worship |