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

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

While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return - the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame - shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.

Art | Change | Danger | Darkness | Doubt | Dreams | Grief | Guile | Hate | Heart | Hope | Liberty | Life | Life | Pain | Quiet | Reason | Suffering | Suspicion | Thankfulness | Trust | Truth | World | Danger | Art |

Emma Goldman

I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love, and freedom in motherhood.

Cause | Convention | Death | Force | Freedom | Frivolity | Grave | Life | Life | Mind | Right | World |

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

Only two pointed arrows betrayal of violence is similar to injure users of worse enemies.

Day | Ecstasy | Heaven | Lying | Music | World | Happiness |

Emma Goldman

Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.

Earth | Force | Gold | Life | Life | Little | Love | Magic | Man | Power | World |

Emma Goldman

Atheism... in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

Cause | Convention | Death | Force | Freedom | Frivolity | Grave | Life | Life | Mind | Right | World |

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

The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.

Men | Object | World |

Emma Goldman

I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.' Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

Behavior | Dreams | Little | Time | World |

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

That... which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least, for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

Men | Object | World |

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

Incomparably beyond, and above us all! Whether still on earth or now in heaven her spirit is at home with God!

Day | World |

Emma Goldman

Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.

Earth | Freedom | Gold | Life | Life | Love | Magic | Man | Power | World |

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

I remember the master, before he fell into a doze, stroking her bonny hair - it pleased him rarely to see her gentle - and saying - 'Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?' And she turned her face up to his, and laughed, and answered, 'Why cannot you always be a good man, father?

Better | Heaven | Little | Need | Past | Safe | World |

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

Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there, had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

Change | Right | World |

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

My great thought is in himself. If all else perished and he remained I should still continue to be and if all else remained and he were annihilated the universe would turn into a mighty stranger. I would not seem apart of it.

Change | Eternal | Little | Love | Pleasure | Thought | Time | Universe | Will | World | Thought |

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

Once you have devastated my palace, do not construe as a hut and think you're being very charitable so.

World |

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

Still, as I mused, the naked room, the alien firelight died away; and from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright, unclouded day.

World |

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

So it's hopeless outside world, twice as valuable as is my world inside.

Suspicion | World |

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

The flash of her eyes had been succeeded by a dreamy and melancholy softness; they no longer gave the impression of looking at the objects around her: they appeared always to gaze beyond, and far beyond—you would have said out of this world.

World |

Emma Goldman

This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

Beginning | Men | Patriotism | World |

Emmet Fox

There is a place for analysis, but it is apt to be quite fatal in prayer and meditation. Do not dissect the love of God, but feel it. Do not dissect divine intelligence, but realize it. Do not wonder how God can possibly solve this problem, but just watch Him do it in His own way—and He will if you will give Him a chance. You know that God is Love. So go ahead on that, and do not get theoretical about it.

Civilization | Human race | Race | World |