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

Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

Employment, which Galen calls, "Nature's physician," is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.

Indolence | Mother | Nature | Wisdom | Happiness |

Nicholas Murray Butler

There are five tests of the evidence of education - correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection, efficiency or the power to do.

Action | Appreciation | Beauty | Character | Correctness | Education | Efficiency | Evidence | Habit | Manners | Mother | Power | Precision | Reflection | Sound | Thought | Wisdom | Worth | Precision | Appreciation | Beauty | Thought |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

I am of opinion that there are no proverbial sayings which are not true, because they are all sentences drawn from experience itself, who is the mother of all sciences.

Experience | Mother | Opinion | Wisdom |

Thomas Campbell

For Beauty's tears are lovelier than her smile.

Beauty | Smile | Tears | Wisdom |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

Cause | Example | Mother | Truth | Wisdom | Witness | Instruction |

John Florio

Night is the mother of thoughts.

Mother | Wisdom |

William Farquhar

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Invention | Mother | Necessity | Wisdom |

Euripedes NULL

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.

Tears | Waste | Wisdom | Old |

Gordon Graham

Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.

Decision | Indecision | Tears | Wisdom |

Thomas Guthrie

More tears are shed in playhouses than in churches.

Tears | Wisdom |

Pope Leo I, aka Pope Leo The Great, Pope Saint Leo I NULL

Peace is the first thing the angels sang. Peace is the mark of the sons of God. Peace is the nurse of love. Peace is the mother of unity. Peace is the rest of blessed souls. Peace is the dwelling place of eternity.

Angels | Eternity | God | Love | Mother | Peace | Rest | Unity | Wisdom | Blessed |

Ellen Goodman

The figures prove that the absolute easiest way to be poor is to be born out of wedlock to a young woman. If you need a statistic to memorize, try this one: 92.8 percent of all children in black, single female-headed families where the mother is under thirty and did not complete high school, are in poverty.

Absolute | Children | Mother | Need | Poverty | Wisdom | Woman |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness; and laughter is on top of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

Despair | God | Laughter | Madness | Mirth | Reason | Sorrow | Tears | Wisdom |

Washington Irving

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth.

Feelings | Fidelity | Mother | Society | Strength | Truth | Wisdom | Child |

Thomas Hobbes

Leisure is the mother of philosophy... The source of every crime , is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions... And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Crime | Error | Force | Leisure | Life | Life | Man | Mother | Philosophy | Understanding | Wisdom |

Victor Hugo

Happiness is a thing of gravity. It seeks for hearts of bronze, and carves itself there slowly; pleasure startles it away by tossing flowers to it. Joy's smile is much more close to tears than it is to laughter.

Joy | Laughter | Pleasure | Smile | Tears | Wisdom |

Richard Hooker

Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is thy bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things do her homage, the very least as feeling her care; and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.

Angels | Care | God | Harmony | Joy | Law | Men | Mother | Peace | Power | Wisdom | World |

William Dean Howells

A man never sees all that his mother has been to him till it's too late to let her know that he sees it.

Man | Mother | Wisdom |