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

Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney

Whatever we accomplish is due to the combined effort. The organization must be with you or you don't get it done... In my organization there is respect for every individual, and we all have a keen respect for the public.

Imagination | Important | Mind | Reality | Spirit |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Hushed be the camps to-day. No more for him life's stormy conflicts, nor victory, nor defeat ? no more time's dark events.

Mystical | Silence | Time |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me; O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you; never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night, by the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon, the messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within, the unknown want, the destiny of me.

Silence |

Walter Brueggemann

The book of Isaiah both appeals to the theological-ideological assumptions and places them in question because the facts on the ground tell otherwise. Thus the book of Isaiah and the larger Jerusalem tradition expose this difficult interface between theological claim and lived reality, a difficult interface that is front and center in the book of Job, a difficult interface that every pastor must face in the form of the theodicy question.

Courage | Failure | Imagination | Poetry | Spirit | Will | Failure | Old |

Walter Brueggemann

We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.

Consciousness | Courage | Imagination | Need | Power | Think |

Walter Brueggemann

It may be the work of the church to name empire for what it is.

History | Imagination | People | Promise | Work |

Walter Brueggemann

In our modern experience, but probably also in every successful and affluent culture, it is believed that enough power and knowledge can tame the terror and eliminate the darkness. A "religion of orientation" fundamentally operates on that basis. But our honest experience, both personal and public, attests to the resilience of the darkness, in spite of us. The

Danger | Imagination | Wants | Danger |

Walter Lippmann

The Many can elect after the Few have nominated.

Example | Government | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Sense | Will | Government |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

When I read the book, the biography famous, and is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will someone when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life, why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Applause | Mystical | Silence | Time |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed and the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, and thought of him I love.

Applause | Mystical | Silence | Time |

Walter Brueggemann

The prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.

Culture | Future | Imagination | Vision |

Walter Savage Landor

For, surely, surely, where your voice and graces are, nothing of death can any feel or know.

Imagination | Youth | Youth |

Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable. In oral verbalization, particularly public verbalization, absolute motionlessness is itself a powerful gesture.

Imagination | Sound | Words | World | Writing |

Washington Irving

As the vine which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs; so it is beautifully ordered by Providence, that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart.

Family | Heart | Imagination | Lord | Money |

Washington Irving

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of ghoul, feeding in the charnel house of decayed literature.

Eternity | God | Paradise | Punishment | Will | God |

Washington Irving

Here's to your good health, and your family's good health, and may you all live long and prosper.

Magic | Need | Silence |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Make sure to praise your children at every opportunity.

God | Peace | Silence | Space | Will | God |

Washington Irving

There is one in the world who feels for him who is sad a keener pang than he feels for himself; there is one to whom reflected joy is better than that which comes direct; there is one who rejoices in another's honor, more than in any which is one's own; there is one on whom another's transcendent excellence sheds no beam but that of delight; there is one who hides another's infirmities more faithfully than one's own; there is one who loses all sense of self in the sentiment of kindness, tenderness, and devotion to another; that one is woman.

Imagination | Nothing | World | Think |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Do not reward illness; instead, praise wellness.

Punishment |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Emotions show up in your body as physical manifestations of your thoughts.

Meditation | Silence |