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

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

My mother phones daily to ask, "Did you just try to reach me?" When I reply no, she adds, "So, if you're not too busy, call me while I'm still alive," . . . and hangs up.

Mind |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There is a rumor that seven states are considering overpruning as a cause for divorce, second only to incompatibility and adultery. I hope our state is one of them. No judge would dare deny me freedom after he heard the story of my privet hedge.

Courage | Dreams | Good | Little | People |

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

Now I have done what I can, he thought. Let him begin to circle and let the fight come.

Mind | Think |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Capacity | Courage | Discipline | People |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

Age | Children | Courage | Old age | Old |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

Courage | Good | Kill | People | Will | World |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Courage | Grace | Story |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. Yes. It's sort of what we have instead of God.

Love | Mind |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.

Ambition | Belief | Economics | Little | Mind | Music | Patriotism | People | Sense | Thought | Ambition | Old | Thought |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.

Better | Courage | Good | Kill | Light | Loneliness | Love | Man | People | Time | Will | Wishes | World | Afraid |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

Good | Mind | Quiet |

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

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Health | Mind | Sound | Truth |

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

We have indeed labored to make some of the capital which today helps us to produce – a large fund of scientific, technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate physical infrastructure; innumerable types of sophisticated capital equipment, etc. – but all this is but a small part of the total capital we are using. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man – and we do not even recognize it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved.

Convictions | Faith | Heart | Ideas | Mind | Reason | War |

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

When people ask for educationÂ… I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement.

Chance | Children | Courage | Promise | Trouble |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |

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

All the indications are that the present structure of large-scale industrial enterprise, in spite of heavy taxation and an endless proliferation of legislation, is not conducive to the public welfare.

Experience | History | Mind |

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

Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.

Age | Civilization | Courage | Fear | Good | Nothing | Question | Strength |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

We may now give the following more precise expression to our chief law of biogeny:— The evolution of the foetus (or ontogenesis) is a condensed and abbreviated recapitulation of the evolution of the stem (orphylogenesis); and this recapitulation is the more complete in proportion as the original development (orpalingenesis) is preserved by a constant heredity; on the other hand, it becomes less complete in proportion as a varying adaptation to new conditions increases the disturbing factors in the development (or cenogenesis).

Life | Life | Mind | Value |

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

Pollution must be brought under control and mankind's population and consumption of resources must be steered towards a permanent and sustainable equilibrium.

Faith | Knowledge | Mind | Nothing | Will | Happiness |