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

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).

Words |

Ernest Becker

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.

Insight | Life | Life | Normality | Nothing | Words | Trouble | Value |

Ernest Becker

If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield, the armor that covers the characterological lie about life, how can you talk about “enjoying” this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with something even more awful: genuine despair. Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power­lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his sym­bolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one ac­cidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man 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. Sartre has called man a "useless passion" because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?

Absolute | Character | Discussion | Dread | Faith | Feelings | Heart | Hero | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Psychology | Religion | Self | Service | Time | Value |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.

Feelings | Will |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

Abstract | Glory | Nothing | Sacrifice | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Life | Life | Words |

Ernest Becker

To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

Contempt | Family | Heart | Ideas | Individuality | Life | Life | Little | Man | Means | Mystery | Need | Pain | Pride | Solitude | Words | Yearnings |

Ernest Callenbach

Certainly Ecotopians regard trees as being alive in almost a human sense Â… And equally certainly, lumber in Ecotopia is cheap and plentiful Â… Wood therefore takes the place that aluminum, bituminous facings, and many other modern materials occupy with us.

Feelings | Order | People |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course, I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in.

People | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia, Karkov grinned and began. First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls from them, then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool. Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. that is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool.

Knowledge | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Abstract | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Blasphemy | Language | Words |

Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.

Glory | Nothing | Sacrifice | Words |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Anytime you have physical discomfort of any kind, whether you call it emotional or physical pain within your body, it ALWAYS means the same thing: "I have a desire that is summoning energy, but I have a belief that is not allowing, so I've created resistance in my body." The solution, every single time, to the releasing of discomfort and pain is the relaxation and the reaching for the feeling of relief.

Attention | Change | Feelings | Good | Important | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The victory of the Cuban Revolution will be a tangible demonstration before all the Americas that peoples are capable of rising up, that they can rise up by themselves right under the very fangs of the monster.

Feelings |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The task of educating and feeding youngsters, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the former absentee landlords to those who laboured every day upon that same land without receiving its benefits, are accomplishments of social medicine.

Darkness | Individuality | Light | Little | Silence | Space |

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

To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

Future | Man | Means | Science | Technology | Words |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Let the world change you and you can change the world.

Feelings | Risk |

Estonian Proverbs

The cat who snoops around will feed his kitten.

Silence |