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 Gould Davis

Recorded history starts with a patriarchal revolution. Let it continue with the matriarchal counterrevolution that is the only hope for the survival of the human race.

Accident | Error | Evidence | Man | Mother |

Dorothy Parker

God's acre was her garden-spot, she said; She sat there often, of the Summer days, little and slim and sweet, among the dead, her hair a fable in the leveled rays.

Good | People | Reading |

Dorothy Parker

Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

Emil M. Cioran

Each time I think of the essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech.

Indifference | Regret | Universe | Will |

Emil M. Cioran

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

Anxiety | Anxiety |

Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

For the belief in God is merely the outcome of the belief in man. God is the apex of the pyramid, not the base. Man is the corner- stone; and from the true conception of man have the Jewish thinkers risen to the noblest conception of the Deity. Those are shallow who talk of their agnosticism and parade their atheism. No one is an agnostic and no one is an atheist, except he have neither pity for the weak nor charity for the erring; except he have no mercy for those who need its soothing balm.

God | Intelligence | Solitude | God |

Dorothy Parker

Symptom Recital: I do not like my state of mind; I'm bitter, querulous, unkind. I hate my legs, I hate my hands, I do not yearn for lovelier lands. I dread the dawn's recurrent light; I hate to go to bed at night. I snoot at simple, earnest folk. I cannot take the gentlest joke. I find no peace in paint or type. My world is but a lot of tripe. I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted. For what I think, I'd be arrested. I am not sick, I am not well. My quondam dreams are shot to hell. My soul is crushed, my spirit sore; I do not like me any more. I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse. I ponder on the narrow house. I shudder at the thought of men... I'm due to fall in love again.

Better | Good | Patience |

Emile Zola

My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of the innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures for a crime he did not commit.

Desire | Eternal | God | Good | Happy | Heaven | Humanity | Life | Life | Longing | God | Happiness |

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

I have for me only an ideal of truth and justice. But I am quite calm; I shall conquer. I was determined that my country should not remain the victim of lies and injustice. I may be condemned here. The day will come when France will thank me for having helped to save her honor.

Humanity | Protest |

Emile Zola

As they have dared, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the normal channels of justice have failed to do so.

Action | Harm | Humanity | Law | People | Protest | Truth | Will |

Émile Souvestre

What have you done with the days God granted you?

Joy |

Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

If you were coming in the fall, I'd brush the summer by, with half a smile and half a spurn,as housewives do a fly. If I could see you in a year,I'd wind the months in balls, and put them each in separate drawers, until their time befalls.

Attention | Care | Control | Life | Life | Little |

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

You must forgive me, for I struggled only for you.

God | Nothing | Right | Satan | God |

Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

They say that God is everywhere and yet we always think of him as somewhat of a recluse.

Need | Smile |

Emmet Fox

A tragic mistake that is often made is to assume that the will of God is bound to be something very dull and uninviting, if not positively unpleasant. Consciously or not some persons look upon God as a hard taskmaster, or a severe parent. . . . The truth is that the will of God for us always means greater freedom, greater self-expression, newer and brighter experience, wider opportunity of service to others—life more abundant.

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 |

Emma Goldman

The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and to be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.

Custom |

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 |