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

Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

As for my labors, if they can but wear one impertinence out of human life, destroy a single vice, or give a morning’s cheerfulness to an honest mind - in short, if the world can be but one virtue the better, or in any degree less vicious, or receive from then the smallest addition to their innocent diversions - I shall not think my pains, or indeed my life, to have been spent in vain.

Better | Character | Cheerfulness | Destroy | Impertinence | Life | Life | Mind | Receive | Virtue | Virtue | World | Think |

Charles Sprague

A light and trifling mind never takes in a great ideas, and never accomplishes anything great or good.

Character | Good | Ideas | Light | Mind |

Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.

Character | Conduct | Mind |

Theodore N. Tiemeyer

Man is a creature who loves to draw lines, but God is the Power that ignores lines and man-made barriers. The more able we are to see some good in everyone and some truth in all beliefs, the closer we shall come to the mind of God.

Character | God | Good | Man | Mind | Power | Truth | God |

Edmund Spenser

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

Character | Good | Happy | Mind |

Stephen Berrien Stanton

The goal of life is imminent in each moment, each thought, word, act, and does not have to be sought apart from these. It consists in no specific achievement, but the start of mind in which everything is done, the quality infused into existence. The function of man is not to attain an object, but to fulfill a purpose; not to accomplish but be accomplished.

Achievement | Character | Existence | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Object | Purpose | Purpose | Thought |