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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He who serves the public is a poor animal; he worries himself to death and no one thanks him for it.

Character | Death | Public | Wisdom |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The only thing that brings a mother undiluted satisfaction is her relation to a son; it is quite the most complete relationship between human beings, and the one that is the most free from ambivalence. The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition which she has had to surpress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not firmly assured until the woman has succeeded in making her husband into her child and in acting the part of a mother towards him.

Ambition | Character | Hope | Husband | Marriage | Mother | Relationship | Woman | Ambition | Child |

Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

A man has only one way of being immortal on this earth: he has to forget he is mortal.

Character | Earth | Man | Mortal |

William Feather

Only the man who can impose discipline on himself is fit to discipline others or can impose discipline on others.

Character | Discipline | Man |

Henry Fielding

Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others concerned with him have done evil! If a man has acted right, he has done well, though alone; if wrong, the sanction of all mankind will not justify him.

Character | Evil | Good | Justify | Man | Mankind | Right | Will | Wrong |

Henry Ford

There are two ways of making money - one at the expense of others, the other by service to others. The first method does not “make” money, does not create anything; it only “gets” money - and does not always succeed at that.

Character | Method | Money | Service |

Benjamin Franklin

Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.

Character | Search |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One can be instructed in society; one is inspired only in solitude.

Character | Society | Solitude |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world - making the most of one's best.

Character | Daring | Pity | Rebellion | Self | World |

Benjamin Franklin

Doing an Injury puts you below your Enemy; Revenging one makes you even with him; Forgiving it sets you above him.

Character | Enemy |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

What we give out as scientific truth is only the product of our own needs and desires, as they are formulated under varying external conditions; that is to say, it is illusion once more. Ultimately we find only what we need to find, and see only what we desire to see. We can do nothing else. And since the criterion of truth, correspondence with an external world, disappears, it is absolutely immaterial what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a right to accuse any one else of error.

Character | Desire | Error | Illusion | Need | Nothing | Right | Truth | World |

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

[Suicide note] - Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

Character | Death | Grief | Heart | Life | Life | Misfortune | Pain | Power | Rights | Service | Suicide | Usefulness |

Lowell Fillmore

The one and only formative power given to man is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for "as he thinketh within himself, so is he."

Body | Character | Man | Power | Thinking | Thought |

Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.

Character | Life | Life | Melancholy |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.

Associates | Character | Mediocrity | Rest | Wonder |

François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others as by self-examination thoroughly to know our own.

Character | Nothing | Self | Will |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Each one sees what he carries in his heart.

Character | Heart |