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

Julian Baggini

Life’s meaning has to be found in the living of life itself, and the promise of eventual death is necessary to make any action worthwhile at all.

Action | Death | Life | Life | Meaning | Promise |

Michael E. Angier

Today’s action becomes tomorrow’s habit.

Action | Habit | Tomorrow |

Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

Thought and action are the redeeming features of our lives.

Action | Thought | Wisdom |

Carol Adrienne

Purpose is about developing relationships. Purpose is about bringing attention and intention into the present moment, moving ahead with new ideas, giving and receiving support, volunteering, mentoring, listening to the imagination and intuition, communicating, taking action based on inner direction and hints from the external, being adaptable, taking responsibility and ending the victim stance forever surrendering to the divine will and working with the lessons developing fluidity, tolerance, compassion, and the ability to love.

Ability | Action | Attention | Compassion | Giving | Ideas | Imagination | Intention | Intuition | Listening | Love | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Will | Victim |

Carol Adrienne

Focus on being grateful… Whatever you focus on with true appreciation and gratitude – you are generating a higher frequency of energy. By living and taking action in a higher frequency (which is also a deeper and richer frequency) you are more aligned with your purpose.

Action | Appreciation | Energy | Focus | Gratitude | Purpose | Purpose | Appreciation |

Margaret Bourke-White

Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.

Action | Life | Life | Man | People | Work |

Tom Butler-Bowdon

The first step on the road to success is good character. The second is openness to new perspectives. The third is ensuring that daily action is shaped by higher aims, with the knowledge that you always reap what you sow.

Action | Aims | Character | Good | Knowledge | Openness | Success |

Adele Brookman

Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to inspire yourself to life.

Death | Imagination | Life | Life |

Andrew Carnegie

No kind action is ever lost.

Action |

Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

In order to live we must decide on one course of action rather than another, moment by moment. We declare our values and take our stands in both small ways and large. Were we to admit that we are never certain that we have chosen correctly, and never reassured that this chosen course was the correct course of action, then we would be open to the unending exploration and revision in our way of living. We would have learned to put our prejudices and assumptions, our convictions and beliefs at risk.

Action | Convictions | Order | Risk |

Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

Whoever hesitates while waiting for ideas to triumph among the masses before initiating revolutionary action will never be a revolutionary. Humanity will, of course, change. Human society will, of course, continue to develop – in spite of men and the errors of men. But that is not a revolutionary attitude.

Action | Change | Humanity | Ideas | Men | Society | Waiting | Will | Society |

Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long eons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future – be it one of promise or threat. Yet genetic deterioration through manmade [chemical and radioactive] agents is the menace of our time, “the last and greatest danger to our civilization.”

Civilization | Danger | Evolution | Future | Individual | Life | Life | Mankind | Past | Promise | Time | Danger |

George Brantl

Reason will find God, but reason will find, too, the need to transcend reason, the promise of more than reason can offer.

God | Need | Promise | Reason | Will |

Robert Bridges, fully Robert Seymour Bridges

Music being the universal expression of the mysterious and supernatural, the best that man has ever attained to, is capable of uniting in common devotion minds that are only separated by creeds, and it comforts our hope with a brighter promise of unity than any logic offers.

Devotion | Hope | Logic | Man | Music | Promise | Unity |

John Dewey

Ideas or hypotheses are tested by the consequences which they produce when they are acted upon.

Consequences | Ideas |

Jacques Ellul

Action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is not obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable.

Absurd | Action | Authority | Justification | Obedience | Past | Receive | Will | Propaganda |