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 thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Life | Life | Words |

William Shakespeare

Cease to lament for that thou canst not help; and study help for that which thou lamentest.

Words |

William Shakespeare

But virtue, as it never will be moved, though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, so lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed and prey on garbage. Two Gentlemen from Verona, Act ii, Scene 7

Fraud | Heart | Heaven | Love | Tears | Words | Govern |

William Shakespeare

BEATRICE: What is he to a lord? Messenger: A lord to a lord, a man to a man; stuffed with all honourable virtues. Beatrice: It is so indeed, he is no less than a stuffed man, but for the stuffing, — Well, we are all mortal. Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Scene 1

Knowing | Will | Words |

Dan Barber

Q: What is your single most important cooking tool? A: A spoon. The most indispensable kitchen tool is also the most basic, and often the most misused. I'm particular about the spoons used at both Blue Hills — we use one kind, and I think it's the right-size spoon for plating and the right-size spoon for tasting. It's not too big; it's not too small. I want everyone to have the same consistency, because the spoon — whether you're flipping a piece of fish, or you're stirring rice, or you're tasting a sauce — becomes an extension of your hand.

Conversation | Enough | Hate | Life | Life | Need | Truth | Will | Afraid |

William Shakespeare

Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd night, give me my Romeo; and when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of Heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun. Romeo and Juliet, Act iii, Scene 2

Fault | Means | Mother | Receive | Shame | Temper | Will | Words | Fault | Guilty |

Cynthia Breazeal

The legal system doesn't have parental rights for robots.

Belief | Disease | Knowledge | Will | World |

Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

Conversation | Music | People | Price | Public | Time | Words | World |

William Shakespeare

Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: from this time forth I never will speak word. Iago, scene ii

Play | Words |

Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL

Happy is the man who finds wisdom... Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her.

Will | Words |

William James

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.

Age | Chance | Disease | Good | Habit | Hate | Life | Life | Little | Luxury | People | Thinking | Time | Will | Learn | Think |

William Gouge

Remember, we do not mount the pulpit to say fine things, or eloquent things, we have there to proclaim the good tidings of salvation to fallen men; to point out the way of eternal life; to exhort, to cheer and support the suffering sinner; these are the glorious topics upon which we have to enlarge -- and will these permit the tricks of oratory, or the studied beauties of eloquence? Shall truths and counsels like these be couched in terms which the poor and ignorant cannot comprehend? Let all eloquent preachers beware lest they fill any man's ear with sounding words, when they should be feeding his soul with the bread of everlasting life! -- Let them fear lest instead of honouring God, they honour themselves! If any man ascend the pulpit with the intention of uttering A Fine Thing, he is committing a deadly sin.

Abundance | Desire | God | Love | Man | Object | Providence | Riches | Will | Words | World | Riches | God |

William James

If we take the universe of fitting, countless coats fit backs, and countless boots fit feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones fit gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions fit realities, and countless truths are valid, tho' no thinker ever thinks them.

Existence | Little | System | Words | Understand |

William James

But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless someday bring about.

Conversation | Criticism | Meaning | Power | Prayer | Sense | Soul |

William James

Experience has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas

Disease | Worry |

William Law

Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator.

Caution | Conversation | God | Good | Light | Means | Meditation | Nothing | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Will | Wills | God |

William Law

Perhaps it may he found more easy to forget the language than to part entirely with those tempers which we learnt in misery.

Evil | Heart | Power | Prayer | Strength | Weakness | Words |

William Law

Covetousness, pride, and envy are not three different things, but only three different names for the restless workings of one and the same will or desire. Wrath, which is a fourth birth from these three, can have no existence till one or all of these three are contradicted, or have something done to them that is contrary to their will. These four properties generate their own torment. They have no outward cause, nor any inward power of altering themselves. And therefore all self or nature must be in this state until some supernatural good comes into it, or gets a birth in it. Whilst man indeed lives among the vanities of time, his covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath may be in a tolerable state, may hold him to a mixture of peace and trouble; they may have at times their gratifications as well as their torments. But when death has put an end to the vanity of all earthly cheats, the soul that is not born again of the Supernatural Word and Spirit of God, must find itself unavoidably devoured and shut up in its own insatiable, unchangeable, self-tormenting covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath.

Desire | God | Heart | Inspiration | Man | Nothing | Prayer | Spirit | Words | God | Old |

William James

The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, He can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.

Civilization | Disease | Fear | Poverty |

William James

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

Conversation | Meaning |