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

Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL

That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place.

Eternal | Eternity | Events | Future | God | Knowledge | Life | Life | Past | Present | Reason | Time | Wisdom | God |

Jean de La Bruyère

Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us; they rejoice in the present.

Children | Future | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding

The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.

Future | Wisdom |

Christian Nestell Bovee

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

Future | Wisdom |

Jean de La Bruyère

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

Children | Future | Past | Present | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

Age | History | Knowing | Men | Past | Present | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Books | God | Life | Life | Past | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

What is past is past. There is a future left to all men who have the virtue to repent, and the energy to atone.

Energy | Future | Men | Past | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

Frank Gelett Burgess

If you wish to be positive, which means youthful, never speak of the past any more than you can help.

Means | Past | Wisdom |

Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

Future | Man | Mind | Past | Wisdom |

Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.

Civilization | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Benedetto Croce

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us.

Past | Wisdom |

John Dewey

The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

Action | Experience | Faith | Future | Reality | Religion | Sense | Will | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead, in the perfectly definite sense it is not alive.

Contradiction | Future | Necessity | Nothing | Past | Present | Sense | Wisdom |