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

Václav Havel

I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don't know. But for me it is good.

Choice | Experience | People |

Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!

Joy |

Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world.

Business | Choice | Death | Destroy | Pain | War | Will | World | Business |

William Shakespeare

And where two raging fires meet together; they do consume the thing that feeds their fury. Though little fire grows great with little wind, yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all. Taming of the Shrew, Act ii, Scene 1

Gentleness | Pity | Will | Forgive |

William Law

If [we] have no chosen the kingdom of God [first], it will make in the end no difference what [we] have chosen instead.

Desire | Life | Life | Nothing | Perfection |

William Shakespeare

O my love, my wife! Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.

Man | Virtue | Virtue |

William Shakespeare

O, but they say the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony. Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. He that no more must say is listened more than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose. More are men's ends marked than their lives before. The setting sun, and music at the close, as the last taste of sweets, is… Richard II, Act ii, Scene 1

Earth |

William Shakespeare

Oh, flatter me; for love delights in praises.

Earth |

Elias L. Magoon

He is always the severest censor on the merits of others who has the least worth of his own.

Earth | Energy | God | Rest | Reward | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. My mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Prayer | Universe |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Life, struck sharp on death, makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–' 'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief) 'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone, and none was left to love in all the world.

Church | Grave | Heart |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Angels |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This guelder rose, at far too slight a beck of the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.

Angels |

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

Ideas | Ignorance | World |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness.

Distress | Grave | Heart | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Past | Rest | Safe | Tears | Think |

Emma Goldman

What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!

Democracy | Free press | Free speech | Opinion | Safe | Speech | War | World |

Erskine Mason

For we may ask in return, what has any secret purpose to do with our role of judgment and action? “Secret things,” we are told, “belong unto the Lord our God; but things which are revealed, unto us and to our children.” The question taken from the hidden purposes of the divine mind, can have no force whatever, because it is an appeal to our ignorance. We know, and can know nothing about them. One thing, however, we do know. God must be always and everywhere consistent with himself; and whether we can understand it or not, it is certain that there can be no inconsistency between revealed and unrevealed truths; and if God has made an offer of eternal life through the atonement unto all men, and commanded all men to embrace it, there cannot be in any purpose of God concerning its nature, anything which will clash with, and so contradict this universal offer.

Circumstances | Earth | God | Light | Means | Mistake | Nature | Necessity | Principles | System | Waste | Will | God | Guilty |

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

To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now.

Fault | Method | Money | Price | Self-deception | Thought | Fault | Thought |

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

The really helpful things will not be done from the centre; they cannot be done by big organizations; but they can be done by the people themselves.