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

Ester and Jerry Hicks

If you are feeling a shortage of time or money, your best effort would be to focus upon better-feeling thoughts, and do more things that make you feel good.

Day | Nothing | Talking | Work |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Day | Revolution | Spirit |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

I do not agree with what you say, but I'll stand to the death defending your right to say what you want.

Fighting | Individual | Method | Objectives | Will |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Neither of the primitive men we have spoken of, nor of those who immediately succeeded them, can we rightly predicate any knowledge of nature.

Circumstances | Day | Evolution | History | Ignorance | Important | Man | Phenomena |

Ernst Toller

After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?

Day | Evolution | Important | Man | People | Phenomena | Science | Truths |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Every day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart?

Day | People |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of live is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change. It is not a question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on. If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would regain the dignity of manÂ…

Excitement | Man | Nature | Society | System | Society |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

All the common phenomena of Morphology and Physiology, of Chorology and Œkology, of Ontology and Paleontology, can be explained by the theory of descent, and referred to simple mechanical causes. It is precisely in this, viz., that the primary simple causes of all these complex aggregates of phenomena are common to them all, and that other mechanical causes for them are unthinkable—it is in this that, to us, the guarantee of their certainty consists.

Day | Discussion | Nature | Society | Truth | Society |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a Newtonian or of a biologist when asked if he is a Pasteurian. There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoplesÂ’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a Marxist with the same naturalness with which one is a Newtonian in physics or a Pasteurian. If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before. Such is the case, for example, of Einsteinian relativity or of PlanckÂ’s quantum theory in relation to NewtonÂ’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that. Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and EngelsÂ’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today. But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought. This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanityÂ’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument.

Excitement | Melancholy |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation.

Day | Land |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Every person has the truth in his heart. No matter how complicated his circumstances, no matter how others look at him from the outside, and no matter how deep or shallow the truth dwells in his heart, once his heart is pieced with a crystal needle, the truth will gush forth like a geyser.

Day | People |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The child is vibrationally receiving your fears, your beliefs, even without your spoken word. If you want to do that which is of greatest value for your child, give thought only to that which you want, and your child will receive only those wanted thoughts.

Day | Reason | Thinking | Thought | Child | Parent | Thought |

Esther Perel

Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Space |

Ethiopian Proverbs

One who plants grapes by the road side, and one who marries a pretty woman, share the same problem.

Day | Time | Will | Child |

Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum

The thinking heart of the barracksÂ…

Day | Important | Rest |

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

And the great question for mankind is what is to be loved or hated next, whenever and old love or fear has lost its hold.

Day | Need | Practice | Question | Time | Teacher |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; but I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.

Day | Hate |

Eudora Welty

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

Beauty | Day | Love | Story | Beauty |

Eugene Peterson

Sabbath is not primarily about us or how it benefits us; itÂ’s about God and how he forms us. ItÂ’s not, in the first place, about what we do or donÂ’t do; itÂ’s about God completing and resting and blessing and sanctifying. These are all things we donÂ’t know much about; they are beyond us but not beyond our recognition and participation.

Day |

Eudora Welty

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

Day | Time |