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

Francis Osborn

Let your wit rather serve you for a buckler to defend yourself, by a handsome reply, than the sword to wound others, though with ever so facetious reproach; remembering that a word cuts deeper than a sharper weapon and the wound it makes is longer curing.

Character | Wisdom | Wit |

Plotinus NULL

Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and clearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering - Lethe stream may be understood in this sense - and memory is a fact of the soul.

Body | Cause | Character | Forgetfulness | Memory | Sense | Soul | Will |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.

Character | Need | Nobility | Spirit | Learn |

Ross Parmenter

The need for devotion to something outside ourselves is even more profound than the need for companionship. If we are not to go to pieces or wither away, we all must have some purpose in life; for no man can live for himself alone.

Character | Devotion | Life | Life | Man | Need | Purpose | Purpose |

Nikita Ivanovich Panin

To crave more than you need - that is poverty.

Character | Need | Poverty |

Theodore Parker

All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little - something which they value for more than its use and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life.

Character | Life | Life | Little | Materialism | Men | Need | Value |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

It does not good to offer consoling words to a man in distress; his real friend in a pinch is a friend in deed, when deeds are needed.

Character | Deeds | Distress | Friend | Good | Man | Words | Deeds |

Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

The health of the soul is to have its faculties - reason, high spirit, and desire - happily tempered, with reason in command, and reining in both the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance.

Character | Desire | Health | Reason | Soul | Spirit |

Publius Syrus

A wise man dreads an enemy, however insignificant.

Character | Enemy | Man | Wise |

Tatjana Patitz

I believe that being true to the self is the most important thing in life - to have a free heart, a pure soul and a pure mind. We all live, or should live, for the fulfillment of the self. We are all mirror images of each other; whatever we feel in ourselves we feel in others. I believe that we create our own lives... Intuition should play the main role in everything we do. Through the creative source of the mind and the unlimited power of the spirit all our deepest wishes come true. For me the meaning is that we are all one, and the only true reality is the spirit. Believing in the power of spirit is simply to have a passion for life, to learn, to grow, to evolve and most of all to love, and live each day and each moment of the day to the fullest.

Character | Day | Fulfillment | Heart | Important | Intuition | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Passion | Play | Power | Reality | Self | Soul | Spirit | Wishes |

Plotinus NULL

It is not by running hither and thither outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state.

Character | Conduct | Morality | Nature | Right | Soul |

Plotinus NULL

The pinions of your soul will have power to still the untamed body. The creature will yield only to watchful, strenuous constancy of habit. Purify your soul from all undue hope and fear about earthly things, mortify the body, deny self - affections as well as appetites - and the inner eye will begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision.

Body | Character | Constancy | Fear | Habit | Hope | Power | Self | Soul | Vision | Will |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

When fate is adverse, a wise man can always strive for happiness and sail against the wind to attain it.

Character | Fate | Man | Wise | Fate | Happiness |

Publius Syrus

Many receive advice, only the wise profit by it.

Advice | Character | Receive | Wise |

Publius Syrus

When you call a man ungrateful you have no words of abuse left.

Abuse | Character | Man | Words |

Publius Syrus

When you love you are not wise: when you are wise you do not love.

Character | Love | Wise |

Francis Quarles

The fountain of beauty is the heart, and every generous thought illustrates the walls of your chamber. If virtue accompanies beauty it is the heart's paradise; if vice be associate with it, it is the soul's purgatory. It is the wise man's bonfire, and the fools furnace.

Beauty | Character | Heart | Man | Paradise | Soul | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wise | Beauty | Thought | Vice |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.

Character | Mind | Soul |