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

Alphonse Karr, fully Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.

Character | Man |

Francis C. Kelley

Convictions are the mainsprings of action, the driving powers of life. What a man lives are his convictions.

Action | Character | Convictions | Life | Life | Man |

Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

No man should think that peace comes easily. Peace does not come by merely wanting it, or shouting for it, or marching down Main Street for it. Peace is built brick by brick, mortared by the stubborn effort and the total energy and imagination of able and dedicated men. And it is built in the living faith that, in the end, man can and will master his own destiny.

Character | Destiny | Effort | Energy | Faith | Imagination | Man | Men | Peace | Will | Wisdom | Think |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

Character | Man |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

In the hour of death the only adequate consolation is that one has not evaded life, but has endured it. What a man shall accomplish or not accomplish, does not lie in his power to decide; he is not the One who will guide the world; he has only to obey... The point consists precisely in loving his neighbor, or, what is essentially the same thing, in living equally for every man. Every other point of view is a contentious one, however advantageous and comfortable and apparently significant this position may be... yet in the hour of death, he will confidently dare say to his soul: “I have done my best; whether I have accomplished anything, I do not know; whether I have helped anyone, I do not know; but that I have lived for them, that I do know, and I know it from the fact that they insulted me. And this is my consolation, that I shall not have to take the secret with me to the grave, that I, in order to have good and undisturbed and comfortable days in life, have denied my kinship to other men, kinship with the poor, in order to live in aristocratic seclusion, or with the distinguished, in order to live in secret obscurity.

Character | Consolation | Death | Good | Grave | Life | Life | Man | Men | Obscurity | Obscurity | Order | Position | Power | Seclusion | Soul | Will | World |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?

Altruism | Character | Darkness | Judgment | Life | Life | Light | Man | Question | Selfishness | Will |

Murray Kempton, fully James Murray Kempton

A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.

Character | Evil | Good | Life | Life | Man |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

He alone is a man who can resist the genius of the age, the tone of fashion, with vigorous simplicity and modest courage.

Age | Character | Courage | Genius | Man | Simplicity |

Lewis Edward Lawes

Never give a man up until he has failed at something he likes.

Character | Man |

George Leonard, fully George Burr Leonard

Conservation is a state of harmony between man and land.

Character | Conservation | Harmony | Land | Man |

Ernest Legouvé, fully Gabriel Jean Baptiste Ernest Wilfrid Legouvé

If he could only see how small a vacancy his death would leave, the proud man would think less of the place he occupies in his lifetime.

Character | Death | Man | Think |

John Locke

There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.

Character | Man | Reason | Rule |

James Russell Lowell

The only conclusive evidence of a man’s sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.

Character | Evidence | Life | Life | Man | Money | Practice | Sincerity | Truth | Words |