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

ROMEO: Is love a tender thing? it is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn. MERCUTIO: If love be rough with you, be rough with love; prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

Devotion | Faith | Good | Sin | Wrong |

William Shakespeare

Singer: Tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart, or in the head? How begot, how nourished?

Will |

William Shakespeare

So man and man should be, but clay and clay differs in dignity, whose dust is both alike.

Enemy | Faith |

William Shakespeare

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps. Much Ado About Nothing (Hero at III, i)

William Shakespeare

SIR ANDREW AGUE-CHEEK: I'll stay a month longer. I am a fellow o' the strangest mind i' the world; I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether (He's an oddity in that he enjoys having fun)

Hate |

William Shakespeare

So all my best is dressing old words new, spending again what is already spent.

Elizabeth Gilbert

If I – as a beneficiary of that exact formula – will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives – instead of just praising mothers as sacred and noble – be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women have to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do so?

Belief | Destiny | Faith | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is American, too-the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness.

Belief | Books | Care | Decision | Diligence | Divinity | Faith | Reason | Religion | Universe | Will |

William Shakespeare

So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

Business | Cause | Day | Death | Duty | Father | God | Greatness | Guilt | Law | Life | Life | Man | Men | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Sin | Soul | Teach | Time | War | Business | God | Guilty | Think |

Elizabeth Gilbert

But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If they love you, you can have all. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, the money of the dog during the dog - anything. If they love will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every sense of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will mentally endowed with all good qualities that you never really developed in yourself and I will buy Christmas gifts for the whole family. I'll give you the sun and the rain, and if not available, I'll keep my tickets later. I'll give you all this and more, until you feel so exhausted and depleted that the only way to restore your energy will be carried away by someone else. did not report these facts for themselves with pride, but it has always been.

Loneliness |

Elizabeth Gilbert

If you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.

Belief | Care | Destiny | Evidence | Faith | God | Life | Life | Light | Meaning | Nature | Play | Prudence | Prudence | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy.

Belief | Faith |

William Shakespeare

Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art, a good mouth-filling oath.

Counsel | Faith | Heaven | Thought | Will | Counsel | Thought |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!

Faith | God | Nature | Need | Will | God |

Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In the pleasant orchard closes, `God bless all our gains', say we; but `May God bless all our losses' better suits with our degree.

Age | Charity | Doubt | Faith |

Elizabeth Gilbert

The search for satisfaction to Aahdf to protection and interest Almatatin, but a generous gift to the world. Saved one of every misery, Azaha of the way. To dream an obstacle, not in front of himself, but also in front of others. Only then will be free to serve the people and enjoy Bhbhm.

Belief | Destiny | Faith | God | Hope | Humanity | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Search | Will | God |

Elizabeth Gilbert

There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

Anxiety | Anxiety |

Elizabeth Gilbert

This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

Faith | Love | Sound |

Elizabeth Gilbert

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow.

Advertising | Enjoyment | Insecurity | Need | People | Worth |

Elizabeth Lesser

I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?

Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |