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

Simone Weil

The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make it.

Absolute | Constraint | Devotion | Fallacy | Nothing | Slavery | Thought | Thought |

Simone Weil

When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.

Contradiction |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.

Contradiction | Life | Life | Object | World |

Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL

Each being is sacred -- meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being.

Devotion | Light | World |

Stephen Charnock

A secret atheism, or a partial atheism, is the spring of all the wicked practices in the world: the disorders of the life spring from the ill dispositions of the heart.

Contradiction | Faith |

Stephen Charnock

It is less injury to Him to deny His being, than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God. He that saith God is not holy speaks much worse that he that saith there is no God at all.

Contradiction | Difficulty | God | Men | Reason | Right | Satan | Will | World | God |

Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl

But I am convinced that those Jews who stand aside today with a malicious smile and with their hands in their trousers' pockets will also want to dwell in our beautiful home.

Belief | Better | Devotion | Enthusiasm | Good | Labor | Money | Will | Work |

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

We live in a great and free country only because our forefathers were willing to wage war rather than accept the peace that spells destruction.

Character | Children | Confidence | Devotion | Faith | Men | People | Power | Qualities | Will | Govern |

Thomas Hobbes

Philosophy is a science about the reasons or about why?.

Devotion | Fear | Ignorance | Men | Talking |

Thomas Hardy

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to. Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

Circumspection | Contradiction | Devotion | Indiscretion |

Thomas Jefferson

All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.

Day | Devotion | Grace | Hope | Light | Mankind | Rights | Science |

Thomas Jefferson

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Administration | Better | Cause | Decision | Devotion | Government | Hope | Law | Opinion | Partiality | People | Power | Right | Spirit | Government | Think |

Thomas Merton

Discovering the contemplative life is a new self-discovery. One might say it is the flowering of a deeper identity on an entirely different plane from a mere psychological discovery, a paradoxical new identity that is found only in loss of self. To find one’s self by losing one’s self: that is part of ‘contemplation.’

Contradiction | God | Order | God |

Thomas Merton

The dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions. We fear that we may be converted – or perverted – by a pernicious doctrine. On the other hand, if we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we may find that viewing things from a basically different perspective – that of our adversary – we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideal more realistically.

Church | Contradiction | Doctrine | Glory | God | Liberty | Light | Love | Man | Nature | Order | Purpose | Purpose | Quiet | Reality | Soul | Spirit | Surrender | Theology | Vision | Will | God |

Thomas Merton

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Contemplation | Day | Desolation | Devotion | Discipline | God | Joy | Justice | Labor | Magic | Obscurity | Obscurity | Peace | Relationship | Security | Spirit | Suffering | World | God | Contemplation | Happiness |

Thomas Paine

It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.

Contradiction | Ideas | Revelation |

Thomas Paine

Mutual fear is a principal link in the chain of mutual love.

Better | Contradiction | Good | Integrity | Knowing | Man | Reason | Will | World | Learn |

Thomas Paine

The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less.

Art | Church | Contemplation | Devotion | Discovery | Evidence | Life | Life | Order | Power | Principles | Science | Study | System | Wisdom | Work | Discovery | Art | Contemplation |

Uttaradhyayana Sutra

Formless realities like soul etc. cannot be apprehended by senses and those which are formless are eternal.

Devotion | Rest | Wants |

Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

Properly pursued, the Art of Cookery allows of no divided attention.

Contradiction | Good | Heaven | Study | Wife | Think |