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

Benjamin Franklin

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, an scarcely in that; for it is true, we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct. Remember this; they that will not be counseled cannot be helped. If you do not hear reason she will rap you over your knuckles.

Advice | Character | Conduct | Experience | Reason | Will | Learn |

Charles W. Garman

Whatever may be true of men’s creed, nothing is clearer than the fact that the personality and the sovereignty of God are not a large factor in the practical life and thought of our age.

Age | Character | Creed | God | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Personality | Thought | God | Thought |

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

[Suicide note] - Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

Character | Death | Grief | Heart | Life | Life | Misfortune | Pain | Power | Rights | Service | Suicide | Usefulness |

Lowell Fillmore

The one and only formative power given to man is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for "as he thinketh within himself, so is he."

Body | Character | Man | Power | Thinking | Thought |

Harry Emerson Fosdick

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

Character | Life | Life | Light | Power |

John Hancock Field

All worthwhile men have good thoughts, good ideas and good intentions - but precious few of them ever translate those into action.

Action | Character | Good | Ideas | Men | Wisdom |

Bernard Gilpin

The habit of virtue cannot be formed in the closet; good habits are formed by acts of reason in a persevering struggle with temptation.

Character | Good | Habit | Reason | Struggle | Temptation | Virtue | Virtue |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the least of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irreversibly greater with time.

Character | Perseverance | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Time |

Henry Fielding

Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly ore of mortal than divine about them.

Character | Ideas | Means | Mortal | World |

J. de Finod

Self-love and reason to one end aspire.

Character | Love | Reason | Self | Self-love |

Jerome P. Fleishman

Do you know what real poverty is? It is never to have a big thought or a generous impulse.

Character | Impulse | Poverty | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Our best hope for the future is that the intellect - the scientific spirit, reason - should in time establish a dictatorship over the human mind. The very nature of reason is a guarantee that it would not fail to concede to human emotions, and to all that is determined by them, the position to which they are entitled. But the common pressure exercised by such a domination of reason would prove to be the strongest unifying force among men, and would prepare the way for further unifications. Whatever, like the ban laid upon thought by religion, opposes such a development is a danger for the future of mankind.

Character | Danger | Emotions | Force | Future | Guarantee | Hope | Mankind | Men | Mind | Nature | Position | Reason | Religion | Spirit | Thought | Time | Danger | Intellect | Thought |

Arnold Geulincx

My will does not produce the motive power to move my limbs. Rather, he who imparted motion to matter, and ordained its laws, shaped my will also; he thus joined together two utterly different things - the movement of matter and the decision of my will in such a way that whenever my will desires some action, the desired bodily movement will occur and vice versa, without there being any causation involved, or any influence of the one upon the other. It is just as if there were two clocks appropriately adjusted with reference to each other and the time of day in such a way that when one struck the hour the other immediately did likewise.

Action | Character | Day | Decision | Influence | Power | Time | Will | Vice |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.

Action | Capacity | Character | Thought | Thought |

Benjamin R. Haydon

We are a compound of both here and hereafter; we shall be made responsible for the actions of both while here. Anything beyond this is beyond our power to prove, and would be of no real value if we could.

Character | Power | Value |

Heinrich Heine

He who fears to venture as far as his heart urges and his reason permits, is a coward; he who ventures further than he intended to go, is a slave.

Character | Heart | Reason |

Robert Hall

In the power of fixing the attention lies the most precious of the intellectual habits.

Attention | Character | Power |

Gustavo Gutiérrez

God’s love is the reason for our creation, a free, gratuitous love, a love without limits... Our duty is to translate this love into acts of solidarity and commitment.

Character | Commitment | Duty | God | Love | Reason |