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

Samuel I. Prime, fully Samuel Irenaeus Prime

Staying where you now are, you must perish; coming to Christ, you can but perish; coming to Christ, no one ever did perish; while you sit still and starve, there is bread enough and to spare in your Father's house. Will you return?

Art | Attention | Children | Day | Good | Hate | Important | Little | Man | Need | Order | Practice | Question | Talking | Will | Words | Instruction | Art |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

Talking | Will |

Simon Wiesenthal

We thought we were going mad, ... Perhaps we feared (or hoped) we were mad already.

Need | People | Talking |

Simon Wiesenthal

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, 'I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.'

Talking | Tragedy |

Simone Weil

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

Talking |

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

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

Beauty | Envy | Love | Talking | Beauty |

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

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I cannot appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

Judgment | Talking | Time |

Stanley Kunitz, fully Stanley Jasspon Kunitz

Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.

Need | Talking | Worth |

Stephan Bodian

When you see everything as the divine expression, including what you once took to belong to you—your body, your thoughts, your feelings—you move with the flow of life instead of struggling against the current.

Experience | Good | Law | Love | Talking | Will | Old |

Stephen Mitchell

Eve bites into the fruit. Suddenly she realizes that she is naked. She begins to cry. The kindly serpent picks up a handkerchief, gives it to her. "It's all right," he says. "The first moment is always the hardest." "But I thought knowledge would be so wonderful," Eve says, sniffling. "Knowledge?!" laughs the serpent. "This fruit is from the Tree of Life."

Happy | Talking | Understand |

Stephen Hawking

However, if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God.

Earth | Fear | Means | Mind | Nature | Need | Past | People | Right | Story | System | Talking | Time | Universe | Will |

Stephen Hawking

I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark.

People | Regard | Talking | Time |

Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

Rather, as he saw it now, the difficulty lay, not in the deed itself, but in the consequences which followed upon not thinking or not knowing.

Feelings | Heart | Illusion | Talking | Words |

Theophrastus NULL

The Boor is one who, having drunk a posset, will go into the Ecclesia. He vows that thyme smells sweeter than any perfume; he wears his shoes too large for his feet; he talks in a loud voice.

Man | Talking | Will |

Thomas Berry

We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable.

Conversation | Listening | Talking |

Thomas Hobbes

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

Devotion | Fear | Ignorance | Men | Talking |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

Sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it’s all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style.

Assertion | Little | Mathematics | Men | Right | Talking |

Thomas Merton

Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure you were created for Joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.

Consolation | Desire | Enough | Glory | Love | Mercy | Nothing | Order | Receive | Talking | Will |

Thomas Nagel

In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a religious perspective by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.

Acceptance | Association | Atheism | Fear | God | Hope | People | Religion | Right | Superstition | Talking | Universe | Virtue | Virtue | Association | God |

Wilfred Cantwell Smith

"I'm not saying that religion is a good thing. I'm saying that it's a great thing. It can make you better or it can make you much worse. But it means that you take the question of how to live seriously.

Talking |