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

Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.

God made man of the dust of the earth and man makes a god of the dust of the earth

Danger | Fear | Ideas | Mind | Stigma | Danger |

Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.

The little things we do - or fail to do - often testify louder than the loudest statements of our intentions.

Ideas | Man |

Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.

The outstanding leaders of every age are those who set up their own quotas and constantly exceed them.

Ideas | Man |

Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz

The fundamental error of psychiatry is that it regards life as a problem to be solved, instead of as a purpose to be fulfilled.

Ideas | Life | Life | Power |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.

Good | Ideas |

Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.

Belief | Custom | Daughter | Dread | Enough | Heaven | Ideas | Knowledge | Little | Love | Passion | People | Shame | Sincerity | World |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks

Ideas | Think |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks. Our words are up to the job. It's our syntax that's limiting.

Better | Dogma | Humor | Ideas | People | Sense | Spirit |

William Godwin

Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil.

Good | Ideas | Judgment | Man | Men | Nature | Nothing | Object | Right | Sense | Submission | Will | Truths |

William James

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.

Criticism | Darkness | Feelings | Ideas | Right |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

Knowledges (or cognitions), in common use with Bacon and our English philosophers till after the time of Locke, ought not to be discarded. It is, however, unnoticed by any English lexicographer.

Ideas |

William James

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Conduct | Day | Feelings | Ideas | Indispensable | Life | Life | Phenomena | Religion | Theories | Thought | Thought |

William James

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it.

Ideas | Means | Power |

William James

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

Ideas | Inconsistency |

William (Morley Punshon) McFee

Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

Ideas | Man |

William James

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

Ideas | Men |