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

Gustave Flaubert

One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.

Association | Training | Association |

Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra

I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.

Future |

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Never deprive someone of hope it may be all they have.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

You can get by on charm for about 15 minutes. After that, you better know something.

World |

Gustavo Gutiérrez

If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.

Think |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.

Gustave Flaubert

The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.

Power | Right |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss of humanity.

Man | Mind |

Gustave Flaubert

We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a na‹ve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

Little | Sound | World |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

World |

Gustave Flaubert

You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.

Hannah Arendt

Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity he among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?

Nature |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

Appetite | Waiting |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Pathology would remain a lovely science, even if there were no therapeutics, just as seismology is a lovely science, though no one knows how to stop earthquakes.

Good | Mind |

Hannah Arendt

Men in plural? can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.

Italian Proverbs

One who wants to keep their yard tidy does not reserve a plot for the weeds.

Change | Civilization | Future | Global | Health | Inconvenient | Land | Security | Will |

Italian Proverbs

Poor men's money and cowards' weapons are often flourished.

Self |

Italian Proverbs

Rain on the day you get married brings good luck.

Consciousness | Power | Understand |

Italian Proverbs

No good thing is failure and no evil thing success.

World |