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

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully.

Position |

Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Question | Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

People | Prison | Public | Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

Day | Present | Will | Value |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.

Hope | Lord | Wants | War | Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk - I mean the bad evening. "Father Brown" said something like "I caught him" (the thief) "with an unseen hook and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."'

Will | Woman |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir. And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir. Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever. So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole young plantation. And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken. So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head. This is quite true.

Books | Will |

Evelyn Underhill

If there is a symbol of our age, perhaps it is something that every factory worker does each day of their working lives -- I refer to clocking in. (Very soon probably they won't even have to do that; the clock will itself observe them by radar.) In the ancient world when a person entered a temple, each made a votive offering to a god or a goddess at the door. As twentieth century people file into their shrines, they obediently pay their due to the god that regulates their lives -- the clock. It is the clock that measures us, that silent witness that keeps our going in and our coming out and relentlessly records our every movement. That is where all our organization and machinery to free us from time, to save us time, has brought us. Never before have we had such control over things, and never before have we been so enslaved by them. And of nothing is this more true than of time.

Better | Circumstances | Consideration | Desire | Gentleness | Life | Life | Strength | Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.

Future | Will | World |

Evelyn Underhill

If we do not at least try to manifest something of Creative Charity in our dealings with life, whether by action, thought, or prayer, and do it at our own cost -- if we roll up the talent of love in the nice white napkin of piety and put it safely out of the way, sorry that the world is so hungry and thirsty, so sick and so fettered, and leave it at that: then, even that little talent may be taken from us. We may discover at the crucial moment that we are spiritually bankrupt.

Control | Day | God | Nothing | Organization | People | Will | Witness | World | God |

Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie

And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue - you know - of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician. And I just couldn't quite accept that.

Will |

Evelyn Underhill

On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.

Contrast | Life | Life | Little | Need | Oratory | Rights | Sense | Wants | Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Fear | Strength | Will |

Ezer Weizman

The strikes hurt the daily lives of the citizens badly, and damage public order... We would hope that all is being done to solve the problems.

Change | Will | Think |

Evelyn Underhill

I come in the little things, Saith the Lord: Not borne on morning wings of majesty, but I have set my feet amidst the delicate and bladed wheat That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod. There do I dwell, in weakness and in power; not broken or divided, saith our God! In your strait garden plot I come to flowers about your porch my vine, meek, fruitful, doth entwine; waits, at the threshold, Love's appointed hour. I come in the little things, saith the Lord: Yea! On the glancing wings of eager birds, the softly pattering feet of furred and gentle beasts, I come to meet Your hear and wayward heart. In brown bright eyes that peep from out the brake, I stand confest. On every nest where feathery patience is content to brood and leaves her pleasure for the high emprize of motherhood -- There doth My Godhead rest. I come in the little things, Saith the Lord.

Looks | Will |

Evelyn Underhill

There is no need for peculiar conditions in order to grow in the spiritual life, for the pressure of God's Spirit is present everywhere and at all times. Our environment itself -- our home and our job -- is the medium through which we experience His molding action and His besetting loveÂ… And this quality of quietness, ordinariness, simplicity, with which the saving action of God enters history, endures from the beginning to the end.

Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

Creed | Paradise | Will |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Other nations use "force"; we Britons alone use "Might.

Will | Words |

Ezra Taft Benson

The Lord raised up the Founding Fathers. He it was who established the Constitution of this land — the greatest document of freedom ever written. This God-inspired Constitution is not outmoded. It is not an outdated “agrarian document” as some of our would-be statesmen, socialists, and fellow travelers of the godless conspiracy would have us believe. It was the Lord God who established the foundation of this nation; and woe be unto those — members of the Supreme Court and others — who would weaken this foundation.

Better | Dread | Promise | Service | Will | Loss |