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

Thomas Jefferson

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

Eternal | Life | Life | Love | Reverence |

Thomas Jefferson

Believing that the happiness of mankind is best promoted by the useful pursuits of peace, that on these alone a stable prosperity can be founded, that the evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come, I have used my best endeavors to keep our country uncommitted in the troubles which afflict Europe, and which assail us on every side.

Church | Faith | Government | Law | Man | People | Religion | Reverence | Government |

Thomas Jefferson

?Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see.

Age | Experience | Government | Men | Present | Reverence | Sacred | Wisdom | Worth | Government |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. Mankind as humanitarian internationalism; reason and virtue as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social desirability; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it.

Love | Reverence |

Thomas Merton

All life is meant to be at the same time profoundly contemplative and rich in active work… It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives. In doing this, we act as co-workers with God. We take our place in the great work of mankind, since in effect the creation of our own destiny, in God, is impossible in pure isolation. Each one of us works out his own destiny in inseparable union with all those others with whom God has willed us to live. We share with one another the creative work of living in the world. And it is through our struggle with material reality, with nature, that we help one another create at the same time our own destiny and a new world for our descendants.

Reverence |

United Nations NULL

The Purposes of the United Nations are: To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace; To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace; To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

Awe | Choice | Day | Eternal | Glory | God | Light | Lord | Love | Loyalty | Loyalty | Purity | Reverence | Sacred | Words | World | God |

Union Prayer Book NULL

Praised are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Creator of light and darkness, who make peace and fashions all things. In mercy, You illuminate the world and those who live upon it. In Your goodness You daily renew creation. How numerous are You works, Adonai! In wisdom, You formed them all, filling the earth with Your creatures. Be praised, Adonai our God, for the excellent work of your hands, And for the lights You created; may they glorify You. Shine a new light upon Zion, that we may swiftly merit its radiance. Praised are You Adonai, Creator of heavenly lights.

Angels | Compassion | Dread | Earth | God | Honor | Light | Peace | People | Reverence | Solitude | Universe | Wisdom | Work | God | Blessed |

Thomas Paine

Virtues are acquired through endeavor, Which rests wholly upon yourself. So, to praise others for their virtues Can but encourage one's own efforts.

Government | Men | Mystery | Reverence | Terror | Government |

Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry

Man is not yet so transfigured that he has ceased to keep the window of his mind and heart open towards Jerusalem, Galilee, Mecca, Canterbury, or Plymouth. The abstract proposal that we worship at any place where God lets down the ladder is not yet an adequate substitute for the deep desire to go up to some central sanctuary where the religious artist vindicates a concrete universal in the realm of the spirit.

Character | Commerce | God | Heart | Magic | Man | Men | Mind | Mother | Mystery | Mystical | Peace | Question | Reality | Religion | Reverence | Right | Sacred | Soul | Spirit | Temper | Will | World | Worship | Trial | Commerce | God |

Westminster Shorter Catechism, aka Shorter Catechism or Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian NULL

Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will... with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.

Art | Children | Father | God | Prayer | Reverence | Art | God |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

That [haunting fear of being wrong] is the fate of those who break without knowing clearly that Communism is wrong because something else is right, because to the challenge: God or Man?, they continue to give the answer: Man… They are witnesses against something; they have ceased to be witnesses for anything.

Awe | Important | Life | Life | Light | Men | Reverence | Wonder | World |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.

Awe | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Reverence | Woman |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

One of the most effective means for transcending ordinary and moving into the realm of extraordinary is saying yes more frequently and eliminating no almost completely. I call it saying yes to life. Say yes to yourself, to your family, your children, your coworkers, and your business...

Energy | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Reverence | Will |

Washington Irving

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

Angels | Art | Nature | Object | Paradise | Power | Reverence | Sacred | Worship | Art |

Wendell Berry

The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition.

Justice | Practice | Reverence | Work |

Wendell Berry

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.

Ability | Arrogance | Behavior | Capacity | Change | Creativity | Danger | Doubt | Effort | Error | Good | Greed | Humility | Life | Life | Pride | Reverence | Sense | Will | World | Danger | Learn | Understand |

Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.

White has been abstracted into a magical nebulous mythology that dominates all inhabitants of our country in their attitudes toward one another. We are all prisoners of that mythology so far as we rebel against it.

Land | Life | Life | People | Reverence |

Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Genius | Integrity | Life | Life | Light | Mind | Nature | Reverence |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

If our thoughts, actions and deeds are pure then we are automatically blessed with added benefits like good health, strength, long life and most importantly benediction. Therefore we should try to keep ourselves pure and chaste.

Experience | God | Grace | Grief | Hate | Love | Reverence | God |

Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

They turn their faces away from the True Guru; they continue to wander aimlessly. They are not accepted by the earth or the sky; they fall into manure, and rot.

Reverence |