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

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is good... to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary as it is difficult to acquire. All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ration; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Belief | Death | Fear | Good | Happy | Ignorance | Imagination | Life | Life | Mind | Nature | Organic | Struggle | War | Wisdom |

Babette Deutsch

The poets were among the first to realize the hollowness of a world in which love is made to seem as standardized as plumbing, and death is actually a mechanized industry.

Death | Industry | Love | Wisdom | World |

Henry Havelock Ellis

Pain and death are a part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

Death | Life | Life | Pain | Wisdom |

Faith Domergue

Some people study all their life, and at their death they have learned everything except to think.

Death | Life | Life | People | Study | Wisdom |

Tyron Edwards

Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread; they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end.

Appetite | Death | Wisdom |

Tyron Edwards

It is not true that there are no enjoyments in the ways of sin; there are, many and various. But the great and radical defect of them all is, that they are transitory and insubstantial, at war with reason and conscience, and always leave a sting behind... They may and often do satisfy us for a moment; but it is death in the end. It is the bread of heaven and the water of life that can so satisfy that we shall hunger no more and thirst no more forever.

Conscience | Death | Heaven | Hunger | Life | Life | Reason | Sin | War | Wisdom |

Owen Feltham

He who always waits upon God, is ready whensoever he calls. He is a happy man who so lives that death at all times may find him at leisure to die.

Death | God | Happy | Leisure | Man | Wisdom |

Horace Fletcher, nicknamed "The Great Masticator"

Fear is an acid which is pumped into one's atmosphere. It causes mental, moral and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death; death to energy and all growth.

Death | Energy | Fear | Growth | Wisdom |

Stefania Follini

I believe in the dignity of being and, even more so, of becoming... Death may not be an end but only a passage, a dimensional leap. And what if, once free of the slavery of three and four dimensions, once released from space and time, we were to discover unimaginable realities beyond our poor five senses?

Death | Dignity | Slavery | Space | Time | Wisdom |

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death!... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

Death | Evil | Imagination | Life | Life | Wisdom | World |

Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.

Death | Fear | Life | Life | Wisdom | Value |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death as things divine.

Death | Disgrace | Humility | Mockery | Poverty | Religion | Reverence | Suffering | Wisdom |

Benjamin R. Haydon

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

Death | Love | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

[The man is free] who is self-reliant... who masters his passions; who fears neither poverty nor death nor prison; who resists his appetites [and] despises worldly ambition.

Ambition | Death | Man | Poverty | Prison | Self | Wisdom |

Robert Hutchins, fully Robert Maynard Hutchins

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Apathy | Death | Democracy | Indifference | Will | Wisdom |

Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger

The grave is a sacred workshop of nature! a chamber for the figure of the body; death and life dwell here together as man and wife. They are one body, they are in union; God has joined them together, and what God hath joined together let no man put asunder.

Body | Death | God | Grave | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Sacred | Wife | Wisdom | God |