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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Character | Childhood | Immortality | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Victor Hugo

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Character | Courage | God | Life | Life | Patience | Peace | Wisdom | God |

William Penn

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Body | Character | Mind | Rest | Silence | Spirit |

Francis Osborn

Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep it being ill for the eyes to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.

Character | Laziness | Lying | Mind | Wisdom |

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Genius is childhood recaptured.

Childhood | Genius | Wisdom |

Carl Victor de Bonstetten

If the memory is more flexible in childhood, it is more tenacious in mature age; if childhood has sometimes the memory of words, old age has that of things, which impress themselves according tot he clearness of the conception of the thought which we wish to retain.

Age | Childhood | Memory | Old age | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Old | Thought |

Thomas Dekker

To awaken each morning with a smile brightening my face; to greet the day with reverence for the opportunities it contains; to approach my work with a clean mind; to hold ever before me, even in the doing of little things, the Ultimate Purpose toward which I am working; to meet men and women with laughter on my lips and love in my heart; to be gentle, kind and courteous through all the hours; to approach the night with weariness that ever woos sleep and the joy that goes with work well done - this is how I desire to waste wisely my days.

Day | Desire | Heart | Joy | Laughter | Little | Love | Men | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Reverence | Smile | Waste | Wisdom | Work |

Henry Fielding

One hour's sleep before midnight, is worth two after.

Wisdom | Worth |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Belief | Childhood | Control | Evolution | Experience | Human race | Individual | Man | Means | Obedience | Race | Religion | Society | Trust | Wisdom | World | Society |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin.

Age | Childhood | Fear | Individual | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Paradise | Sense | Shame | Wisdom |

Thomas Guthrie

Faith is the backbone of the social and the foundation of the commercial fabric; remove faith between man and man, and society and commerce fall to pieces. There is not a happy home on earth but stands on faith; our heads are pillowed on it, we sleep at night in its arms with greater security for the safety of our lives, peace, and prosperity than bolts and bars can give.

Commerce | Earth | Faith | Happy | Man | Peace | Prosperity | Security | Society | Wisdom | Society | Commerce |

Victor Hugo

The world of sleep has an existence of its own.

Existence | Wisdom | World |

D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts are the result of my dreams. It is very queer, but my dreams make conclusions for me. They decide things finally. I dream a decision. Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusion of my vague days and offer me them as dreams.

Decision | Dreams | Wisdom |

Charles Lamb

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

Childhood | Heart | Wisdom | World |