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

William Ewart Gladstone

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

Duty | Government | People | Right | Wisdom | Wrong | Government |

French Student Revolt Graffiti NULL

It is because property exists that there are wars, riots and injustices.

Property | Wisdom |

William Randolph Hearst

Let us distinguish between the creation of wealth for the community and the extortion of wealth from the community.

Distinguish | Wealth | Wisdom |

Gail Hamilton, Pseud. of Mary A. Dodge

There is generally no such thing as duty to the people who do it. They simply take life as it comes, meeting, not shirking its demands, whether pleasant or unpleasant; and that is pretty much all there is of it.

Duty | Life | Life | People | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Self knowledge is best learned, not by contemplation, but action. Strive to do your duty and you will soon discover of what stuff you are made.

Action | Contemplation | Duty | Knowledge | Self | Will | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We would know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

Better | Mankind | Wisdom |

R. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz

The Kaddish is not a prayer for the dead, but a mandate for the living... It bids man rise above his sorrow... and fixes his view upon the welfare of mankind. It lifts his hope and vision to a day... when mankind shall at last inhabit the earth as children of the one God and Father, and justice reign supreme in peace.

Children | Day | Earth | Father | God | Hope | Justice | Man | Mankind | Peace | Prayer | Sorrow | Vision | Wisdom | God |

Jamake Highwater

Art is a staple of mankind - never a by-product of elitism. So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sing of life when every other aspect of civilization fails... Like hunger and sex, it is a disposition of the human cell - a marvelous fiction of the brain which recreates itself as something as mysterious as mind. Art is consistent with every aspect of every day in the life of every people.

Art | Civilization | Day | Hunger | Life | Life | Mankind | Mind | People | Wisdom | Art |

Robert Howard, fully Sir Robert Howard

All mankind is one of these two cowards - either to wish to die when he should live, or live when he should die.

Mankind | Wisdom |

Thomas Hughes

If we look abroad upon the great multitude of mankind, and endeavor to trace out the principles of action in every individual, it will, I think, seem highly probably that ambition runs through the whole species, and that every man, in proportion to the vigor of his complexion, is more or less actuated by it.

Action | Ambition | Individual | Man | Mankind | Principles | Will | Wisdom | Ambition |

David Hume

A philosopher, who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colors, if by accident he falls into error, goes not farther; but renewing his appeal to common sense, and the natural sentiments of the; mind, returns into the right path, and secures himself from any dangerous illusions.

Accident | Common Sense | Error | Mankind | Mind | Right | Sense | Wisdom |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness.

Abundance | Books | Creativity | Determination | Global | Love | Meaning | Need | People | Position | Poverty | War | Will | Wisdom | Work | Leadership |

Washington Irving

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude… The love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul.

Affliction | Duty | Love | Solitude | Sorrow | Wisdom |

George Stillman Hillard

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

Beauty | Language | Mankind | Taste | Wisdom | Beauty |

Thomas Hobbes

The end of worship amongst men is power. For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerful, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his power greater. But God has no ends: the worship we do him proceeds from our duty and is directed according to our capacity by those rules of honor that reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of damage, or in thankfulness for good already received from them.

Capacity | Duty | Ends | Fear | God | Good | Honor | Hope | Man | Men | Power | Reason | Thankfulness | Wisdom | Worship | God |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

In the whole range of human vision nothing is more attractive than to see a young man full of promise and of hope, bending all his energies in the direction of truth and duty and God, his soul pervaded with the loftiest enthusiasm, and his life consecrated to the noblest ends. To be such a young man is to rival the noblest and best of men in heroic valor.

Duty | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nothing | Promise | Soul | Truth | Vision | Wisdom | World |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Divisive forces are more powerful than those which make for union. Vested interests in language, philosophies of life, table manners, sexual habits, political, ecclesiastical and economic organizations are sufficiently powerful to block all attempts, by rational methods, to unite mankind for its own good. And there is nationalism. With the 57 varieties of tribal gods, nationalism is the religion of the 20th century. We may be Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians or Atheists; but the fact remains that there is only one faith for which large masses of us are prepared to die and kill, and that faith is nationalism.

Faith | Good | Kill | Language | Life | Life | Mankind | Manners | Religion | Wisdom |

Washington Irving

Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much, says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.

Ideas | Language | Little | Man | Observation | Reflection | Sound | Thinking | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Words | Thought |

William Ralph Inge

The nations which have put mankind most in their debt have been small states - Israel, Athens, Florence, Elizabethan England.

Debt | Mankind | Nations | Wisdom |