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

Theodore T. Munger

Proverbs are but rules, and rules do not create character. They prescribe conduct, but do not furnish a full and proper motive. They are usually but half truths, and seldom contain the principle of the action they teach.

Action | Character | Conduct | Proverbs | Teach |

Jean Baptiste Massillon

I love a serious preacher, who speaks for my sake and not for his own; who seeks my salvation, and not his own vainglory. He best deserves to be heard who uses speech only to clothe his thoughts, and his thoughts only to promote truth and virtue.

Character | Love | Salvation | Speech | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Michael Murphy

Love transcends normal needs and motives, revealing a unity among people and things more fundamental than any differences between them. It is its own reward.

Character | Love | Motives | People | Reward | Unity |

Maurice Nicoll

No one can change himself beyond his life, hereafter, beyond his Time, but only within his life. His attainment of unity is something that must belong to his life, this life, that is himself; and if we can equate unity and ‘eternal life’, it is something that cannot life in some ‘tomorrow’ or ‘hereafter’ beyond a man’s life. Its possibilities belong to us now, to something we have to do now. It is this life that must be worked upon, be made more real, by separating the false by insight.

Attainment | Change | Character | Eternal | Insight | Life | Life | Man | Time | Tomorrow | Unity |

Thomas Paine

'Tis not in numbers but in unity that our great strength lies.

Character | Strength | Unity |

Plotinus NULL

To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul’s expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness.

Action | Character | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Happiness |

Leon Roth

Moral action is the meeting-place between the human and divine.

Action | Character |

Arthur Rimbaud, fully Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.”

Action | Character | Morality | Weakness |

Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.

Action | Character | Life | Life | Man | Serenity | Spirit |

William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.

Action | Character | Mind |

William Gilmore Simms

Better that we should err in action than wholly refuse to perform. The storm is so much better than the calm, as it declares the presence of a living principle. Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption also.

Action | Better | Character | Corruption | Death |

Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

The only true method of action in this world is to be in it, but not of it.

Action | Character | Method | World |