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

W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.

Action | Change | Knowledge |

Walker Percy

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Knowledge | Will | Work |

W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

Mathematicians, it is often said, tend to be musical. It is less well known that problems arising from music have played an important role in the discovery of fundamental mathematical ideas. Questions about the vibrations of a piano string led to a fierce controversy that forced mathematicians to clarify their ideas about area, continuity, and the convergence of series.

Education | Knowledge | Nothing | Opportunity | Will | Trouble | Teacher |

W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming

Lack of knowledge – that is the problem.

Action | Knowledge | World |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

Neither natural ability without instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist.

Knowledge | Means | Right | Understand |

Wallace Stevens

You could almost see the brass on her gleaming, not quite. The mist was to light what red is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing, without teetering a millimeter's measure. The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence.

Desire | Knowledge | Mind | World |

Wallace Stevens

That tuft of jungle feathers, that animal eye ...

Knowledge |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

But basilicas of the greatest dignity and beauty may also be constructed in the style of that one which I erected, and the building of which I superintended at Fano.

Age | Knowledge | Nature | Strength |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action. A plenary meeting of the Soviet must be called to decide on mass searches in Petrograd and the goods stations. To carry out these searches, each factory and company must form contingents, not on a voluntary basis: it must be the duty of everyone to take part in these searches under the threat of being deprived of his bread card. We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.

Knowledge | Mind |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical,—under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another,—why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another.

Knowledge | Reality | System |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practicing moral self-purification; I don't eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.

Knowledge |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.

Knowledge |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

Furthermore, since I have observed that our citizens are distracted with public affairs and private business, I have thought it best to write briefly, so that my readers, whose intervals of leisure are small, may be able to comprehend in a short time.

Knowledge | Philosophy | Principles | Problems | Will |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organization of comprehensive political exposure.

Doubt | Existence | Knowledge | Nothing | Phenomena | Regard | World | Think |

Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect.

Ability | Authority | Design | Judgment | Knowledge | Men | Object | Position | Practice | Principles | Skill | Study | Theories | Work | Child |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

One cannot live in society and be free from society.

Discovery | History | Knowledge | Life | Life | Science | Technology | Discovery |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Death | Delusion | Knowledge | Life | Life | Light | Love | Reason | Think |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

Esteem | Knowledge |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

Compensation | Death | Knowledge |