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

Emil Nolde

Sometimes it seems to me that I am capable of absolutely nothing, but that nature through me can accomplish a great deal.

Passion |

Emile Zola

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy... It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.

Crime | Duty | History | Insult | Justice | Society | Suffering | Truth | Insult | Society |

Emile Zola

Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion! Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.

Crime | Guilt | Judgment | Opinion | Treason | Guilty |

Emile Zola

Angelique, with both hands open, lying limply on her knees, was giving herself. And Felicien remembered the evening on which she had run barefoot through the grass, so adorable that he had pursued her, and whispered in her ear, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you. And he understood full well that only now had she replied, with the same cry, I love you, the eternal cry that had finally emerged from her wide-open heart. I love you... Take me, carry me away, I am yours.

Care | Cause | Crime | Day | Disgrace | Earth | Exploit | God | Important | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Nature | Pain | Suffering | Tears | World | God | Vice |

Emile Zola

But you said so yourself, the poor lass will die of it...Do you really want her to die?

Absolute | Conduct | Crime | Evil | Innocence | Justice | Law | Mankind | Office | Public | Suffering | Time | War | Guilty |

Emile Zola

Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

Passion |

Emile Zola

It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break.

Crime | Defense | Existence | Important | Justification | War |

Emile Zola

Nothing is more irritating than to hear honest writers protest about depravity when one is quite certain that they make these noises without knowing what they are protesting about.

Crime | Suffering |

Emiliano Zapata, fully Emiliano Zapata Salazar

The land free, the land free for all, land without overseers and without masters.

Freedom | People | Sacrifice |

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

She bounded before me, and returned to my side, and was off again like a young greyhound; and, at first, I found plenty of entertainment in listening to the larks singing far and near; and enjoying the sweet, warm sunshine; and watching her, my pet, and my delight, with her golden ringlets flying loose behind, and her bright cheek, as soft and pure in its bloom, as a wild rose, and her eyes radiant with cloudless pleasure. She was a happy creature, and an angel in those days. It is a pity she could not stay content.

Earth | Mind | Nature | Passion |

Emma Goldman

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism? Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities. Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.

Atheism | Belief | Earth | Fighting | God | Individual | Influence | Man | Power | Rule | Servitude | Thought | God | Thought |

Emma Goldman

It takes less mental effort to condemn than to think.

Atheism | Fighting | Influence | Thought | Thought |

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

I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be — that proves I love him better than myself.

Passion | Superstition |

Emma Goldman

In modern capitalism economic exploitation rather than political oppression is the real enemy of the people.

Ideas | Passion | Qualities | Revolution |

Emma Goldman

The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

Atheism | Contentment | Humanity | Life | Life | Philosophy | World |

Empedocles NULL

A man of wise mind could not divine such things as these, that so long as men live what indeed they call life, so long they exist and share what is evil and what is excellent, but before they are formed and after they are dissolved, they are really nothing at all.

Man | Right |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

To kill, like to die, is to seek an escape from being, to go where freedom and negation operate. Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened.

Atheism | God | Piety | Worth | God |

Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

He had then warned his daughter not to violate the Eleventh Commandment. Which one is that? I asked her. Do not bullshit thy father, she said.

Art | Eternal | Science | Art | Understand |

Ernest Becker

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.

Absence | Consciousness | Death | Evil | Means | Meditation | Men | Power |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The economic calculus, as applied by present-day economics, forces the industrialist to eliminate the human factor because machines do not make mistakes, which people do. Hence the enormous effort at automation and the drive for ever-larger units. This means that those who have nothing to sell but their labor remain in the weakest possible bargaining position.

Antithesis | Cultivation | Dependence | Freedom |