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

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

A living organism... feeds upon negative entropy... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

Experiment | Meaning | Observation |

Etel Adnan

Does the memory of its own laws?

Change | Meaning |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Most people have put anything that earns money in the category of the things that I HAVE to do. And that is why the money often comes so hard.

Children | Language | People | Talking | Universe | Think |

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

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Aims | Art | Awareness | Experience | Individual | Meaning | Means | Mind | Nothing | Power | Practice | Present | Reflection | Spirit | Work | Art | Awareness |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

The progress of the operations, whose analysis and origin have been here explained, is obvious. At first, there is only a simple perception in the mind, which is no more than the impression it receives from external objects.

Language | Music |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

If that ghost have money I tells him never to haunt you -- less'n he wants to lose it!

Life | Life | Meaning | Truth | Ugly | Learn |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real.

Accident | Earth | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Will | Woman | Understand |

Eugene Peterson

I have my doubts (that the schools will open on time). We have a law case out of Sojourner-Douglass, and at Chesapeake we have all kinds of issues.

Expectation | God | Illusion | Imagination | Meaning | Means | Will | Work | God | Expectation |

Eugene Peterson

By setting the anguish out into the open and voicing it as a prayer, the psalm gives dignity to our suffering. It does not look on suffering as something slightly embarrassing that must be hushed up and locked in a closet (where it finally becomes a skeleton) because this sort of thing shouldnÂ’t happen to a real person of faith. And it doesnÂ’t treat it as a puzzle that must be explained, and therefore turn it over to theologians or philosophers to work out an answer. Suffering is set squarely, openly, passionately before God. It is acknowledged and expressed. It is described and lived.

Culture | Doubt | Language |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

All men cannot connect their ideas with equal force, nor in equal number: and this is the reason why all are not equally happy in their imagination and memory.

Language |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot

Life | Life | Meaning | Nothing | Novels |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

The end of class struggles and class rule, of master and slave, or ignorance and vice, of poverty and shame, of cruelty and crime -- the birth of freedom, the dawn of Brotherhood, the beginning of MAN. That is the demand.

Wants | Wealth |

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

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

Language | People | Time | Will | Words |

Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest — this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it. As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.

Age | Awakening | Conquest | Duty | Glory | History | Nothing | Object | Reason | War | Wealth | World |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.

Books | Church | Meaning | Silence | Talking | Time | Writing |