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

William Shakespeare

Be it art or hap, he hath spoken true.

Will |

William Shakespeare

Cold indeed, and labor lost: then farewell heat, and welcome frost!

Birth | Power | Spirit |

William Shakespeare

By this good light, this is a very shallow monster! I afeard of him? A very weak monster! The Man i' th' Moon? A most poor credulous monster!--Well drawn, monster, in good sooth! The Tempest, Act ii, Scene 2

Change | Man | Music | Power | Spirit | Time |

William Shakespeare

But neither bended knees, pure hands held up, sad sighs, deep groans, nor silver-shedding tears, could penetrate her uncompassionate sire. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Proteus at III, i)

Change | Man | Music | Spirit | Time |

William Shakespeare

By the Lord, thou say'st true, lad--and is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench? PRINCE HENRY: As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle--and is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance? Henry IV, Part I, Act 1

Soul | Terror | Tragedy |

Claude-Adrien Helvétius

He who will warrant his virtue in every possible situation is either an impostor or a fool.

Soul | Teach |

William Shakespeare

Discomfort guides my tongue And bids me speak of nothing but despair. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (Salisbury at III, ii)

William Shakespeare

Come, now a roundel and a fairy song; then, for the third part of a minute, hence-- Some to kill canters in the musk-rose buds, some war with reremice for their leathren wings, to make my small elves coats, and some keep back the clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders at our quaint spirits.

Day |

William Shakespeare

Come, come, good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used. Exclaim no more against it. Othello the Moor of Venice (Iago at II, iii)

Day | Love | Learn | Think | Winning |

William Shakespeare

Dead is noble Timon, of whose memory hereafter more. Bring me into your city, and I will use the olive with my sword, make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each prescribe to other, as each other's leech. Let our drums strike. Timon of Athens, Act v, Scene 4

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We know nothing important. In the essentials we are still as wholly a mystery to ourselves as Adam was to himself.

Body | Man | Soul |

William Shakespeare

Discretion is the better part of valour. [The better part of valour is discretion.] Henry IV, Part I, Act v, Scene 4

Heaven | Light | Guilty |

William James

Often quoted in forms that correspond only loosely to Hugo's original words, for example: No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.

Soul | Truths |

William James

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.

Criticism | Darkness | Feelings | Ideas | Right |

William James

But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Day | Death | Insight | Little | Man | Method | Mind | Patience | Psychology | Style | Success | Superiority | Tenacity | Thought | Uncertainty | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Thought |

William James

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

Good | Soul | Will |

William Gurnall

It is not only our duty to pray for others, but also to desire the prayers of others for ourselves.

Heaven |

William Gurnall

Of all creatures in this visible world, light is the most glorious; of all light, the light of the sun without compare excels the rest.

Prayer | Soul | Waiting |

William Gouge

Reprehension is a kind of middle thing betwixt admonition and correction: it is sharpe admonition, but a milde correction. It is rather to be used because it may be a meanes to prevent strokes and blowes, especially in ingenuous and good natured children. [Blows are] the last remedy which a parent can use: a remedy which may doe good when nothing else can.

Eternal | Fear | Good | Intention | Man | Salvation | Soul | Suffering | Will | Truths |

William James

However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven’t it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

Abstract | Individuality | Majority | Space |