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

Ernest Leroy Boyer

Our obsession with test scores has produced distorted curriculum, teaching, and educational policy. As long as it continues, we will get the dual phenomena of rising test scores and too many illiterate and enumerate citizens.

Obsession | Phenomena | Policy | Will | Wisdom |

Richard Carlson

I find that if I remind myself (frequently) that the purpose of life isn't to get it all done but to enjoy each step along the way and live a life filled with love, it's far easier for me to control my obsession with completing my list of things to do.

Control | Life | Life | Love | Obsession | Purpose | Purpose |

Albert Einstein

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism have brought me to my ideas.

Criticism | Curiosity | Endurance | Ideas | Obsession | Self |

C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family

There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance.

Instinct | Little | Man | Money | Obsession | Order | People |

Eugène Delacroix, fully Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix

What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Enough | Genius | Ideas | Men | Obsession | Work |

Sam Keen

Perhaps the greatest price men have paid for the obsession with fearlessness is to have become tough on the outside but empty within. We are hollow men. The connection between fearlessness and feelinglessness should be obvious.

Men | Obsession | Price |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.

Creativity | Era | Immortality | Life | Life | Obsession | People |

Henry Spencer Moore

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

Habit | Obsession |

Joan Borysenko

Gratitude is indeed like a gearshift that can move our mental mechanism from obsession to peacefulness, from stuckness to creativity, from fear to love. The ability to relax and be mindfully present in the moment comes naturally when we are grateful.

Ability | Fear | Obsession | Present |

Joni Mitchell, born Roberta Joan Anderson

The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth.

Culture | Need | Obsession |

Murray Bookchin

It’s not enough, however, to blame our environmental problems on the obsession with growth. A system of deeply entrenched structures — of which growth is merely a surface manifestation — makes up our society. These structures are beyond moral control, much as the flow of adrenaline is beyond the control of a frightened creature This system has, in effect, the commanding quality of natural law.

Blame | Control | Growth | Obsession | Problems | System |

Ralph Nader

He's got an obsession to immunize corporations.

Obsession |

Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

Force | Nations | Need | Obsession | War | Think |

Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

Obsession | Will |

Thomas Merton

Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love Him. Without love for Him they cannot be 'justified' or 'made just'. That is to say: they cannot conform to Him Who is love. Those who have not received His mercy are in a state of injustice with regard to Him. It is their own injustice that is condemned by His justice. And in what does their injustice consist? In the refusal of His mercy.

Emotions | Joy | Love | Obsession | Purity | Relationship | Spirit | Unique | Will |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.

Battle | Books | Growth | Life | Life | Loafing | Man | Mind | Obsession | Pleasure | Rest | Science | Search | Struggle | World | Old |

Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

A rescuing idea is one that disagrees with your habitual nature but which agrees with Truth.

Competition | Happy | Man | Nature | Need | Obsession | Thinking | Will | Happiness |