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

Ethiopian Proverbs

If relatives help each other, what evil can hurt them?

Will |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Many people protest when we explain to them the power of telling the story of their finances as they want it to be rather than as it is, because they believe that they should be factual about what is happening. But if you continue to look at lackful what-is and speak of what-is, you will not find the improvement that you desire. If you want to effect substantial change in your life experience, you must think thoughts that feel different as you think them.

Fun | Time | Will |

Esther Perel

In order to be one, you must first be two.

Commitment | Love | Marriage | Relationship | Security | Story | Will | Writing |

Estonian Proverbs

Who eats a lot will do a lot.

Will |

Esther Perel

When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love. It is also the kiss of death for sex. Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

Paradox | People |

Ethiopian Proverbs

Men fear danger, women only the sight of it.

Ethiopian Proverbs

One who recovers from sickness soon forgets about God.

Estonian Proverbs

Who is born stupid will die stupid.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

We judge the objects to touch only because we have learned to judge. In fact, if we consider the size of an object, we see that it is relative to that of other objects, so we have to compare it with and judge the extent to which these differ from them, if we want to get an idea of its size, and so for ideas of substance, of shape and weight. In other words, all the ideas that come from touch presuppose the comparison and judgment.

Action | Rest |

Eudora Welty

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

Ambiguity | Words |

Eudora Welty

Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. ...I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them...

Reading |

Eugen Drewermann

All the things you did until you turned forty confront you again after midlife as a task, but this time inwardly.

Life | Life |

Eugene Peterson

A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, that one.

Bride | Good | History |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

It will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

Love | Nothing | Warning | World |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Language was a long time without having any other words than the names which had been given to sensible objects, such as these, tree, fruit, water, fire, and others, which they had more frequent occasion to mention.

Distinguish | Fear | Ideas | Metaphysics | Reason |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Rhime did not, in the fame manner as measure, figures, and metaphors, derive its origin from the first institution of languages.

Wants |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Not merely to learn philosophy, but to become a philosopher, this is what is now at stake. It does not involve giving up philosophy as a science; it rather involves aiming at possessing philosophy in a different and more exalted way as included in wisdom itself, to which it is in the same relation as a body to its soul. Then also does the philosophical life truly begin, and its beginning does not consist in any addition to already acquired learning; it rather looks like falling in love, like answering the call of a vocation, or undergoing the transforming experience of a conversion.

Life | Life | Man |

Eugen Herrigel

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Aims | Art | Awareness | Experience | Individual | Meaning | Means | Mind | Nothing | Power | Practice | Present | Reflection | Spirit | Work | Art | Awareness |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; but I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.

Day | Hate |

Eugene Peterson

I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

Books | Choice | Church | Size | Learn |