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

Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella

Then the music strikes up, and freely they pardon the offences and faults of the enemy, and after the victories they are kind to them, if it has been decreed that they should destroy the walls of the enemy's city and take their lives.

Action | Boys | Change | Destroy | Hunger | Kill | Nature | People | Science | Thinking | Old |

Tryon Edwards

Attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it.

Beauty | Genius | Greatness | Beauty |

Thucydides NULL

Abstinence from all injustice to other first-rate powers is a greater tower of strength than anything that can be gained by the sacrifice of permanent tranquility for an apparent temporary advantage.

Fighting | Thinking | Will |

Thucydides NULL

An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character, and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy.

Courage | Daring | Decision | Generosity | Pleasure | Present | Will | Hardship | Friends |

Thucydides NULL

But what most oppressed them was that they had two wars at once, and has thus reached a pitch of frenzy which no one would have believed possible if he had heard of it before it had come to pass.

Courage | Pleasure | Will | Hardship |

Thucydides NULL

Their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound prediction; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.

Energy |

Thucydides NULL

It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disasters to discuss the matter.

Belief | Enemy | Man | Practice | Rest | Right | Superiority | Think |

Thucydides NULL

For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him, and admires whoever will not bend before him.

Action | Day | Earth | Famous | Freedom | Glory | Greatness | Honor | Knowing | Knowledge | Love | Men | Mortal | Praise | Sense | Speech | Story | Will | Happiness |

Thurgood Marshall

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

Ability | Compassion | Greatness |

Hugh Blair

The discipline which corrects the baseness of worldly passions, fortifies the heart with virtuous principles, enlightens the mind with useful knowledge, and furnishes it with enjoyment from within itself, is of more consequence to real felicity, than all the provisions we can make of the goods of fortune.

Beauty | Genius | Good | Little | Mind | Power | Rest | Sensibility | Taste | Words | Beauty |

William Shakespeare

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Greatness | Sound | Think |

Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

Success |

Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.

Change | Important | Life | Life | Rule | Think |

William James

From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.

Habit | Means |

William James

It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.

Resignation | Stoic | Universe | Happiness |

William James

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.

Eternal | Greatness | History | Individual | Life | Life | Need | Truth | Work | World |

William James

Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.

Acquaintance | Distinction | Little | Man |

William Matthews

To be contented,--what, indeed, is it? Is it not to be satisfied,--to hope for nothing, to aspire to nothing, to strive for nothing,--in short to rest in inglorious ease, doing nothing for your country, for your own or others' material, intellectual, or moral improvement, satisfied with the condition in which you or they are placed? Such a state of feeling may do very well where nature has fixed an inseparable and ascertained barrier,--a "thus far, shalt thou go and no farther,"--to our wishes, or where we are troubled by ills past remedy. In such cases it is the highest philosophy not to fret or grumble, when, by all our worrying and self-teasing, we cannot help ourselves a jot or tittle, but only aggravate and intensify an affliction that is incurable. To soothe the mind down into patience is then the only resource left us, and happy is he who has schooled himself thus to meet all reverses and disappointments. But in the ordinary circumstances of life this boasted virtue of contentment.

Acquaintance | Man | Nothing |