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

Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

To the mother alone it has been given, that her soul during the nine months should touch the soul of the child, and impose upon it predispositions to truth, gentleness, goodness, the culture of which precious germs she should complete in the light of day, after having sown them in the mysterious mysteries of her maternity.

Culture | Day | Gentleness | Light | Mother | Soul | Truth |

Joan Borysenko

A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father, but it can be known only as love.

Father | God | Illusion | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Mystery | Spirit |

Jeremy Bentham

Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial. Under the auspices of publicity, the cause in the court of law, and the appeal to the court of public opinion, are going on at the same time... It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security.

Cause | Justice | Law | Mother | Opinion | Public | Security | Soul | Time |

John Bright

Ignorance is the mother of prejudice.

Ignorance | Mother | Prejudice |

John Adams

An ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy.

Mother | Wit | Worth |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

When brain and heart frequencies entrain, they enter a synchronous, resonant, or coherent wave pattern. Though rare in adults, such entrainment is critical to full development of our human nature… The same entrainment of heart frequencies occurs between mother and infant during breast-feeding and other close body contact.

Body | Heart | Human nature | Mother | Nature |

Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Remember to think of your departed mother always as living, just away in another room of our Father’s house.

Father | Mother | Think |

Mary Howitt

God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race - to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; to bring round our fireside bright faces and happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My soul blesses the Great Father every day, that He has gladdened the earth with little children.

Aims | Children | Day | Earth | Father | God | Happy | Little | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Soul |

Plato NULL

The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

Invention | Mother | Necessity |

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Necessity! thou mother of the world.

Mother | Necessity | World |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and for this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry.

Cause | Circumstances | Day | Experiment | Father | Luck | Man | Men | Time | Luck |

Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL

Beware of covetousness, which is a malady, diseaseful, incurable. Intimacy with it is impossible, it makes the sweet friend bitter, it alienates the trusted one from his master, it makes father and mother mad… it divorces a man’s wife.

Father | Friend | Man | Mother | Wife |

Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."

Father | Means | Mother | Power | Rest | Will |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest and supreme and the most comprehensive community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God have descended the seeds not only to my father and grandfather, but to all beings which are generated on the earth and are produced... why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world?

Earth | Father | God | Man | Men | World | God |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There never was child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

Mother | Child |

Robert Burton

Employment, which Galen calls "Nature's physician," is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.

Indolence | Mother | Nature | Happiness |

Saint Benedict of Nursia NULL

Discretion is the mother of virtue.

Discretion | Mother | Virtue | Virtue |

Robert Orben

Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards.

Credit | Father | Life | Life | Mother |