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

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Make yourself available for success, and know and trust in an invisible force that's all-providing.

Children | Praise |

Wendell Berry

Nothing is given that is not Taken, and nothing taken That was not first gift. The gift is balanced by its total loss, and yet, And yet the light breaks in, Heaven seizing its moments That are at once its own and yours.

Day | Future | Government | Hope | Little | Love | Man | Mind | Mystery | Praise | Will | Work | Government | Approval |

Wendell Berry

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.

Man | Praise | Approval |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

A little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die

Art | Capacity | Good | Guests | Husband | Impression | Men | People | Quiet | Smile | Space | Woman | Art |

Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously he will not be put off by that opposition.

Art | Opinion | Praise | Work | Art |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this.

Enough | God | Life | Life | Little | Praise | God |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.

Beauty | Day | Ends | Husband | Mind | Praise | Reading | Time | Beauty | Think |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.

Blame | Fame | People | Poetry | Praise | Writing |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.

Deeds | Evil | Good | Praise | Deeds |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard... But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?

Illusion | Praise | Truth |

Rig Veda, or The Rigveda

Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom.

People | Praise |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

He performs worship ceremonies, applies the ceremonial tilak mark to his forehead, and takes his ritual cleansing baths; he pulls out his knife, and demands donations.

Praise |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

In his hearth and home, in his palace, upon his soft and comfortable bed, day and night, the flower-girls scatter flower petals; but without the Lord's Name, the body is miserable. Horses, elephants, lances, marching bands, armies, standard bearers, royal attendants and ostentatious displays - without the Lord of the Universe, these undertakings are all useless.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Applause | Envy | Eternal | Ideals | Men | Praise | Self | Society | Society |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

The same gold is fashioned into various articles; just so, the Lord has made the many patterns of the creation.

Praise | Worship |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

You must be uncomfortable when those around you are unhappy; when you ease their discomfort, you are making them happy and making yourself happy, isn't it?

Men | People | Praise | Strength | Weakness |

Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.

Children | Despair | Evil | Happy | Pain | People | Praise | Treason | Trouble | Happiness |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

It is a pity that men cannot usually possess no talent without any desire to put others down.

Mediocrity | Praise |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

We must all wait and worry all the time and men.

Love | Praise |