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-Jacques Rousseau

The hatred of the wicked is only roused the more from the impossibility of finding any just grounds on which it rest; and the very consciousness of their own injustice is only a grievance the more against him who is the object of it.

Character | Consciousness | Impossibility | Injustice | Injustice | Object | Rest |

Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL

Vice, the opposite of virtue, shows us more clearly what virtue is. Justice becomes more obvious when we have injustice to compare it to. Many such things are proved by their contraries.

Character | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Virtue | Virtue |

Kenneth Ring

The meaning of life has something to do with realizing that our essence is perfect love, then going on to live our lives upon that truth, experiencing each day as a miracle and every act as sacred.

Character | Day | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Sacred | Truth |

Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

Whatever may happen in the future, I know that I have learned three things which will remain forever convictions of my heart as well as my mind. Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful and miraculous treasure in the world. Fulfillment of duty is another beautiful thing, making life happy and giving to the soul an unconquerable force to sustain ideals. This is my second conviction, and my third is that cruelty, hatred, and injustice never can and never will be able to create a mental, moral or material millennium.

Character | Convictions | Cruelty | Duty | Force | Fulfillment | Future | Giving | Happy | Heart | Ideals | Injustice | Injustice | Life | Life | Mind | Soul | Will | World |

Leland Stanford, fully Amasa Leland Stanford

Count the day lost, whose low descending sun views from thy hand no worthy action done.

Action | Character | Day |

John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent

I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike trust in God.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Character | Charity | Cheerfulness | Conversation | Day | Diligence | Discontent | Fidelity | God | Habit | Life | Life | Magnanimity | Self | Service | Silence | Thought | Trust | Will | Thought |

Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom NULL

It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Character | Day | Force | Money | Need | Will |

George Matthew Adams

That one who does not get fun and enjoyment out of every day in which he lives, needs to reorganize his life. And the sooner the better, for pure enjoyment throughout life has more to do with one's happiness and efficiency than almost any other single element.

Better | Day | Efficiency | Enjoyment | Fun | Life | Life | Wisdom | Happiness |

Spiro T. Agnew, fully Spiro Theodore Agnew

Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities.

Cause | Civil disobedience | Defiance | Democracy | Disobedience | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Little | Reason | Rights | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories.

Day | Time | Wisdom |

Bias NULL

Love as if you would one day hate, and hate as if you would one day love.

Day | Hate | Love | Wisdom |

Bruno Bettelheim

Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communication coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones they see on the screen, and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The “TV child”... gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him.... If, later in life, this block of solid inertia is not removed, the emotional isolation from others that starts in front of TV may continue... This being seduced into passivity and discouraged about facing life actively on one’ sown is the real danger of TV.

Ability | Children | Danger | Day | Isolation | Life | Life | Meaning | Personality | Reality | Wisdom | Danger | Inertia | Learn |

Honoré de Balzac

It is easier to be a lover that a husband for the simpler reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day that to say pretty things from time to time.

Day | Husband | Reason | Time | Wisdom |

Mother Tessa Bielecki

Take a fresh look at celebrating the Sabbath. Consider spending one day a week being childlike, consciously breaking the deliberate, patterned life you have adopted. Without this destructuring, spiritual life becomes too serious and goal-oriented. Throughout the week, we live in the world of becoming, always striving to perfect ourselves spiritually. On the Sabbath, we drop all forms of becoming and inhabit the world of being, living in the end-state of all practice as if it had already occurred. From this most crucial of spiritual practices flows the inspiration to carry us through the entire week.

Day | Inspiration | Life | Life | Practice | Sabbath | Wisdom | World |

Mother Tessa Bielecki

Live more closely to the rhythms of nature... To keep our priorities straight, it is helpful to live more deliberately, with enough discipline to evoke and sustain a sensitivity to the inner life. To honor the rhythms and requirements of your life, be sure that the pattern you adopt is organic and flexible, rather than arbitrary and artificial... Live each day mindfully. Spiritual life requires no strongman acts, no glittering achievements or spectacular successes, but it does require passionate fidelity to the hundred little things of mundane life.

Day | Discipline | Enough | Fidelity | Honor | Life | Life | Little | Nature | Organic | Wisdom |

Newton D. Baker, fully Newton Diehl Baker, Jr.

The man who graduates to-day and stops learning to-morrow is uneducated the day after.

Day | Learning | Man | Wisdom |