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

Ethiopian Proverbs

A silly daughter teaches her mother how to bear children.

Sense | Shame |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

To include the strength of marriage in that of love, c ' is going up 'to ignore the spirit of this institution.

Duty | Mind | Sense | Terror |

Eudora Welty

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

Respect | Sense | Respect |

Eugen Herrigel

You have described only too well, replied the Master, where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.

Danger | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Time | Danger |

Eugene Peterson

The mistake we so often make is thinking that GodÂ’s interest and care for us waxes and wanes according to our spiritual temperature.

God | Lord | Sense | Words | God |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

I can do what I want, but the trouble is that I do not quite know what to do.

Enjoyment | Love | Man | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.

Love | Man | Melancholy | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.

Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

A credulous, religious-minded fool, as I've pointed out! And he carried his credulity into the next period of his life, where he believed in one social or philosophical Ism after another, always on the trial of Truth! He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was true, that there is no truth for men, that human life in unimportant and meaningless. No. He was always grasping at some absurd new faith to find and excuse for going on!

Knowledge | Little | Sense |

Eugene Peterson

All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.

Conversation | Hurry | Prayer | Sense | Work |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.

Common Sense | Sense | Think |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

Despair | Individual | Land | Man | People | Sense | Will | Woman |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

Language | Little | Nothing | Sense | Writing |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general "They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to".

Family | Life | Life | Sense |

Eustace Budgell

Those who have searched into human nature observe that nothing so much shows the nobleness of the soul, as that its felicity consists in action. Every man has such an active principle in him that he will find out something to employ himself upon, in whatever place or state of life he is posted.

Conversation | Discretion | Giving | Good | Love | Man | Nothing | Sense |

Euripedes NULL

May he die with no joy at his end, The man who won't be troubled To unlock the keys of his heart and make a friend.

Sense |

Eugenio Montale

Far away, I was with you when your father entered in the shadows and left you his farewell.

Sense |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it."

Anarchy | Discovery | Love | Peace | Rest | Sense | World | Discovery | Old |

Evelyn Underhill

The business and method of mysticism is love.

Important | Life | Life | Reading | Sense | Wonder |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to "a semi-official statement"; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as "a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of "well-informed circles.

Emotions |