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

Italian Proverbs

On every small pretext the wolf seizes the sheep.

Ability | Fault | Mind | Fault |

Italian Proverbs

Of what does not concern you say nothing, good or bad.

Consideration | Man | Nothing |

Italian Proverbs

One good morsel and a hundred vexations.

Mind | Need | People |

Italian Proverbs

On a long journey even a straw is heavy.

Enough | Good | Man |

Italian Proverbs

One may have good eyes and yet see nothing.

Action | Man | Prejudice | Reason |

Italian Proverbs

Never speak of a rope in the house of one who was hanged.

Man |

Italian Proverbs

The devil is bad because he is old.

Ability | Age | Art | Control | Culture | Humor | Memory | Need | Time | Work | World | Art |

Italian Proverbs

The liar is not believed when he speaks the truth.

Man |

Italian Proverbs

The sound of the bell does not drive away rooks.

Mind |

Italian Proverbs

What is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh.

Hope | People | Understanding |

Italian Proverbs

The world wags on with three things: doing, undoing, and pretending.

Ability | Adventure | Character | Comfort | Convictions | Daring | Ideas | Injustice | Injustice | Love | Man | Men | Qualities | Sound | Suffering | Talking | Time | Universe | Will | Witness | Blessed | Old | Winning |

Italian Proverbs

What shall I say when it is better to say nothing?

Body | Men | Mind | Reason |

Italian Proverbs

Where there's a will there's a way.

Mind | Thought | Thought |

Italian Proverbs

What the eye sees not the heart rues not.

Feelings | Mind | Mindfulness | Practice |

J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

In the development and the maintenance of a living organism the coordination is very clear. The development of each part can be shown to be dependent on that of other parts, including the immediate environment; and the more closely development and maintenance are studied the more evident does this become. But the particular manner in which the parts and the environment influence one another is such that the specific structure and activities of the organism are maintained. They are unmistakably developed and maintained as a whole, and this is what we mean when we say that the organism lives a specific life. The conception of its life enables us to predict the general behavior of its parts so long as it is alive, and in particular it enables us to predict the general manner of its reproduction from a rudimentary part of the same organism? it is this co-ordinated maintenance that we call life.

Life | Life | Man |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Every writer making a secondary world wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.

Man |

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

Appreciation | Art | Faith | Heart | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Mind | People | Religion | Appreciation | Art |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Any corner of that county (however fair or squalid) is in an indefinable way 'home' to me, as no other part of the world is. There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn't do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that.

Existence | Hope | Important | Man | Woman |

J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Body | Mind |