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

V. W. Burrows

One of the saddest experiences which can ever come to a human being is to awaken, gray-haired and wrinkled near the close of an unproductive career, to the fact that all through the years he has been using only a small part of himself!

Character | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge; and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

Character | Growth | Ignorance | Knowledge | Mind | Nature | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.

Character | Elegance | Heart | Hurry | Luxury | Means | Refinement | Study | Think |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.

Character | Heaven | Man | Men | Music | Play | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |

William Congreve

Uncertainty and expectation are the joyous of life. Security is an insipid thing, and the overtaking and possessing or a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

Character | Expectation | Folly | Life | Life | Security | Uncertainty | Wisdom | Expectation |

Samuel Butler

He who does not make his words rather serve to conceal than discover the sense of his heart deserves to have it pulled out like a traitor’s and shown publicly to the rabble.

Character | Heart | Sense | Traitor | Words |

William Ellery Channing

The great duty of God’s children is to love one another. This duty on earth takes the name and form of the law of humanity. We are to recognize all men as brethren, no matter where born, or under what sky, or institution or religion they may live. Every man belongs to the race, and owes a duty to mankind... Men cannot, by combining themselves into narrower or larger societies, sever the sacred, blessed bond which joins them to their kind... The law of humanity must reign; over the assertion of all human rights.

Assertion | Character | Children | Duty | Earth | God | Humanity | Law | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Race | Religion | Rights | Sacred | Blessed |

Pierre Charron

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions; and it is a fact that the same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying.

Character | Nature | Pain | Pleasure |

Pierre Cornielle

The more kindness we heap upon one who hates us, the more we arm him to betray us.

Character | Kindness |

Richard Cecil

If there is any person whom you dislike, that is the one of whom you should never speak.

Character |

William Newton Clarke

If I can not do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

Character |