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

Elizabeth Gilbert

Traveling is the great true love of my life... I am loyal and constant in my love of travel. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby - I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me.

Excitement | God | Right | Scripture | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Better | Life | Life |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed- much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts.

Enough |

Elizabeth Lesser

So please forgive me when I say that everything that happens to us in life is a blessing — whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy. It is true: There is meaning hidden in the small changes of everyday life, and wisdom to be found in the shards of your most broken moments. At the end of a dark night of the soul is the beginning of a new life.

Action | Culture | Life | Life | Problems | Right | Time | Will |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.

Right | Truth |

Elizabeth Lesser

One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'

Age | Better | Cause | Earth | Enlightenment | Fame | Famous | Fortune | Good | Illusion | Kill | Labor | Light | Man | Mind | Money | People | Present | Problems | Shame | Terrorism | Work | Worry | Instruction | Understand |

Elizabeth Lesser

Are you becoming more and more aware of the interconnection of all beings, creatures and elements? Do you hold as your own Jesus' words: 'And whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me'? Are you getting tired of the way our society celebrates the false ego's selfish and insatiable drive to acquire and use more and more? And does that make you want to be an agent of healing? A declaration of life's interdependence is a sign of spiritual progress.

Arrogance | Fear | Fighting | Health | Life | Life | Listening | Nature | Practice | Soul | Surrender | Uncertainty | Will |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The flower-girl's prayer to buy roses and pinks, held out in the smoke, like stars by day.

Day | Life | Life |

Elizabeth Gilbert

There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone…that’s how the light of God gets in.

Body | Circumstances | Energy | Fate | Life | Life | Money | Regard | Will | Words | Fate |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness, Round our restlessness His rest.

Greatness | Life | Life | Think |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Eternity stands always fronting God; a stern colossal image, with blind eyes, and grand dim lips, that murmur evermore, "God - God - God!"

Disdain | Doubt | Earth | Heart | Life | Life | Little |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west.

Better | Books | Looks | Love | Story | Will | Writing |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Whatever's lost, it first was won; we will not struggle nor impugn. Perhaps the cup was broken here, that Heaven's new wine might show more clear. I praise Thee while my days go on.

Life | Life | Soul | Tears | Will | Happiness |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

With her ankles sunken in asphodel She wept for the roses of earth which fell.

Life | Life |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but pain is not the fruit of pain.

Children | Life | Life | Sense | Words |

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Men say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood. If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes and plait the crown of thorns.

Church | Government | Men | Office | Public | Will | Government |

Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL

It is true that the world was made in six days, but it was by God, to whose power the infirmity of men is not to be compared.

Desire | Life | Life |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look at the other. Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ's name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother's heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!

Good | Life | Life | Love | Memoirs | Suffering | Happiness |

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Change is the watchword of progression. When we tire of well-worn ways, we seek for new. This restless craving in the souls of men spurs them to climb, and to seek the mountain view.

Life | Life | People | Will |

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

While I may paint in the tints or outlines of rocks and beaches, dawns and harbor, fleet and wharf, I never draw portraits of my neighbors or of my friends.

Life | Life | Power |