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

Elizabeth Gilbert

What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God

God | Question | God |

Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

This is the testimony of all the good books, sermons, hymns, and memoirs I read--that God's ways are infinitely perfect; that we are to love Him for what He is and therefore equally as much when He afflicts as when He prospers us; that there is no real happiness but in doing and suffering His will; and that this life is but a scene of probation through which we pass to the real life above.

Question |

Dorothy Parker

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

Question | Time |

Emil M. Cioran

What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

Question | Time | Think |

Emile Zola

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.

Authority | Conscience | Doubt | Fear | Justice | Knowledge | Position | Public | Responsibility | Struggle | Terror | Guilty | Understand |

Emil M. Cioran

We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.

Misfortune | Misfortune |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.

Novelty | Novelty |

Emma Goldman

Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.

Discovery | Freedom | Man | Personality | Society | Work | Society | Discovery |

Emma Goldman

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.

Mind | Past | Question | Right | Time |

Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

I think there are ghosts that roam the world, I know. Stay always with me, in the form you want, fool me again! But the only thing you can do is leave me alone in this abyss where I cannot find you.

Life | Life | Little |

Emma Goldman

One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing.

Inevitable | Inferiority | Merit | Position | Question | Right | Woman |

Emma Goldman

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.

Evolution | Future | Hypocrisy | Ideas | Important | Lesson | Past | Psychology | Time |

Emmet Fox

If you will change your mind concerning anything and absolutely keep it changed, that thing must and will change too. It is the keeping up of the change in thought that is difficult. It calls for vigilance and determination.

God | Question | Thinking | Will | God |

Emmet Fox

If the survival of humanity depended upon you or me, it would be a poor lookout for the Great Enterprise, would it not? The captain is on the bridge.

Humanity | Question | Universe | Worry |

Emmet Fox

This extraordinary Power, mystic though I have rightly called it, is nevertheless very real, no mere imaginary abstraction, but actually the most practical thing there is. The existence of this Power is already well known to thousands of people in the world today, and has been known to certain enlightened souls for tens of thousands of years. This Power is really no less than the primal Power of Being, and to discover that Power is the Divine birthright of all men. It is your right and your privilege to make your contact with this Power, and to allow it to work through your body, mind, and estate, so that you need no longer grovel upon the ground amid limitations and difficulties, but can soar up on wings like an eagle to the realm of dominion and joy.

Failure | Good | Joy | Necessity | Need | Failure |

Emmet Fox

Stop thinking about your difficulties, whatever they are, and start thinking about God instead.

Difficulty | God | Knowing | Life | Life | Metaphysics | Question | Success | Truth | Work | Wrong | Following | God |

Emma Lazarus

Still on Israel's head forlorn, every nation heaps its scorn.

Curiosity |

English Proverbs

Ask God for what man can give, and you may get it.

Question |

Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

I read one psychologist's theory that said, "Never strike a child in your anger." When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he's recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?

Aid | Desire | Future | People | Question | Talking | Value |

Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

Her handwriting was curious, small sharp little letters with no capitals (who did she think she was, e. e. cummings?).

Love | Question |