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

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

When the Sex War ended with the slaughter of the Grandmothers, they found a bachelor's baby suffocating under them; somebody called him George and that was the end of it: they hitched him up to the Army.

Taste | Work |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Children | Little |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.

Change | Children | Church | Courage | Events | Men | Parents | Power | Public | Religion | Revolution | Time | Will | World | Learn |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

Children want to know things, they want to do things. Teachers do not have to put life into them: the life is there, waiting for an outlet. All that is needed is to preserve and to direct its flow.

Better | Business | Children | Life | Life | Mathematics | Business |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

The topics and treatment of the mathematics syllabus should be determined by the following principles: a. The course must be enjoyable and generate steadily increasing enthusiasm in the pupils, b. It should develop independence and activity of mind, curiosity, observation, and confidence, c. It should make pupils familiar with the basic ideas and processes of mathematics.

Children | Confidence | Life | Life | Mathematics | Truth | Will | Value |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

Energy then is morally neutral, it is good or bad depending on the direction it takes. Our task is to provide legitimate outlets for it. The provision of such outlets is important in three ways - for society, for the individual and for the learning of subjects. For any society that wishes to remain civilized this is the highest priority; only by providing satisfactory activities for all citizens can delinquency, vandalism, crime and violence become exceptional rather than normal. This is a priority of which our dominant institutions seem totally unaware. For the individual, finding a satisfactory outlet for energy means a sense of fulfillment and escape from frustration. For the learning of subjects it is the driving force without which little will be learned.

Children | Duty | Energy | Enthusiasm | Life | Life | Society | Society | Child |

Wallace Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.

Children | Love |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

The best way to learn geometry is to follow the road which the human race originally followed: Do things, make things, notice things, arrange things, and only then reason about things.

Children | Discussion | Need | Work |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

I would like to emphasize that the activity approach does not mean every lesson must take place in the playground. All that is necessary is that there should be enough activity to make the mathematical work meaningful and purposive.

Children | Thought | Time | Thought |

W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

When it began, Christianity was regarded as a system entirely beyond the range and scope of human reason; it was impious to question; it was impious to examine; it was impious to discriminate. On the other hand, it was visibly instinct with the supernatural. Miracles of every order and degree of magnitude were flashing forth incessantly from all its parts.

Children | Evidence |

Wallace Stevens

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes each year to disguise the clanking mechanism of machine within machine within machine.

Taste |

Wallace Stevens

She says, but in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

Boys | Taste |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.

Children | Teach | Will |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

I have therefore thought that it would be a worthy and very useful thing to reduce the whole of this great art to a complete and orderly form of presentation, and then in different books to lay down and explain the required characteristics of different departments.

Better | Means | Purity | Taste |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

When it appears that a work has been carried out sumptuously, the owner will be the person to be praised for the great outlay which he has authorized; when delicately, the master workmen will be approved for his execution; but when proportions and symmetry lend it an imposing effect, then the glory of it will belong to the architect.

Children | Property |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

She wants to go home, but nobodys home. That's why she lies, broken inside. With no place to go, no place to go, to dry her eyes, broken inside...

Children | Fate | Husband | Pain | Reason | Tenderness | Thought | Fate | Thought |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

Children | Love | Opportunity | Soul |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Math anxiety: an intense lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 MPH.

Books | Conspiracy | Literature | Nonsense | Nothing | Reading | Suspicion | Taste |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?

Absence | Children | Distinguish | Listening | Melody | Nothing |