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

Emil Fackenheim, fully Emil Ludwig Fackenheim

Man can never escape the ideal or absolute; he can merely exchange one absolute for another. He can ignore anything beyond his needs only by making an ideal out of the fulfillment of his needs themselves. In short, man cannot be an animal; he can only be a philosopher or anthropologist who asserts that men are animals and ought to live like them. It is not necessary to point out that this is just to set up another absolute.

Absolute | Character | Fulfillment | Man | Men |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

On its highest level man's contemporary desire to escape responsibility expresses itself not in emphasis on luck, or in emotional submission to fate, but in a thoroughgoing deterministic theory, ascribing all personal qualities to heredity and environment.

Character | Desire | Fate | Heredity | Luck | Man | Qualities | Responsibility | Submission |

David Hume

Delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion; it enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pain as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.

Character | Mankind | Pain | Passion | Rest | Taste | Happiness |

Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

Poverty persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it.

Character | Man | Poverty |

Georgii Litichevsky Semenovich

Life means love. We are here for love. Only love is real and everything is real thanks to love. We are nomads wandering through illusionary space. How to make it real? Only by destroying limits that separate us from others. No violence, no attempts at escape can help, only love. Too often love is more painful than joyful. The instances of love are much shorter than the periods during which we wait for love to emerge. The meaning of living is mastering the art of waiting.

Art | Character | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Means | Space | Waiting | Art |

Maurice Nicoll

Is it not only through the recognition of scale (faith) in ourselves that we can escape from the negation of life?

Character | Faith | Life | Life |

Maurice Nicoll

Death is a fact in our natural reality - that is, in our sense-given experience of life - and as long as we cannot understand that we apprehend though the senses only a minute part of total existence and reality, we cannot escape from the violent effect of its suggestion.

Character | Death | Existence | Experience | Life | Life | Reality | Sense | Understand |

Janet Erskine Stuart, known as Mother Janet Stuart

We must never try to escape the obligation of living at our best.

Character | Obligation |

Washington Allston

Reverence is an ennobling sentiment; it is felt to be degrading only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own littleness by elevating itself into an antagonist of what is above it. He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look down.

Mind | Pleasure | Reverence | Sense | Sentiment | Wisdom |

Chayim Zev Wolf of Zbaraz

A person who gathers honey will not escape being stung by bees. A person who gathers roses will not escape being scratched by thorns.

Character | Will |