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

Eustace Budgell

We are generally so much pleased with any little accomplishments, either of body or mind, which have once made us remarkable in the world, that we endeavor to persuade ourselves it is not in the power of time to rob us of them. We are eternally pursuing the same methods which first procured us the applauses of mankind. It is from this notion that an author writes on, though he is come to dotage; without ever considering that his memory is impaired, and that he hath lost that life, and those spirits, which formerly raised his fancy and fired his imagination. The same folly hinders a man from submitting his behavior to his age, and makes Clodius, who was a celebrated dancer at five-and-twenty, still love to hobble in a minuet, though he is past threescore. It is this, in a word, which fills the town with elderly fops and superannuated coquettes.

Human nature | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | Will |

Euripedes NULL

Down on your knees, and thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love.

Day | Divinity | Evil | Good | Pious | Waste | Words | Yielding | Old |

Evan Esar

Experience is the only school from which no one ever graduates.

Science |

Euripedes NULL

The divine power moves with difficulty, but at the same time surely.

Day |

Evelyn Underhill

Many people seem to think that the spiritual life necessarily requires a definite and exacting plan of study. It does not. But it does require a definite plan of life; and courage in sticking to the plan, not for merely days or weeks, but for years.

Angels | Beauty | Church | Ends | Little | Universe | Worship | Beauty |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

Day | Extreme |

Evan Esar

Graduation: A ceremony that marks the end of college study and the beginning of education.

Day |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

Day | Present | Will | Value |

Evelyn Scott, also wrote under pseudonyms Ernest Souza and Elsie Dunn

The moon... is a mad woman holding up her dress so that her white belly shines. Haughty, impregnable, ridiculous, silent and white as a debauched queen.

Day |

Evelyn Underhill

If we do not at least try to manifest something of Creative Charity in our dealings with life, whether by action, thought, or prayer, and do it at our own cost -- if we roll up the talent of love in the nice white napkin of piety and put it safely out of the way, sorry that the world is so hungry and thirsty, so sick and so fettered, and leave it at that: then, even that little talent may be taken from us. We may discover at the crucial moment that we are spiritually bankrupt.

Control | Day | God | Nothing | Organization | People | Will | Witness | World | God |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Perhaps all our lovers are merely hints and symbols; vagabond languages scrawled on gate-posts and paving stones along the weary road that others have trampled before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond each other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

Day | Glory | Laughter | Men | Quiet |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

Day | Heart | Music | Present |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

The sound of the English country families baying for broken glass.

Day | Death | Guests |

Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

Art | History | Important | Little | Purpose | Purpose | Art |

Faith Baldwin

Men's private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world's seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping.

Balance | Day | Grief | Law | Life | Life | Little | Love | Loss |

Faith Baldwin

Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.

Courage | Day | Enough | Hope | Learning | Light | Strength | Think |

Ezra Taft Benson

Thoughts lead to acts, acts lead to habits, habits lead to character - and our character will determine our eternal destiny.

Day | Love | Spirit | Spirituality | Work |