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

Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says "I" means something different by it from what every other person means. What is "I" to me is only "you" to you. And this "I" incorporates experience into itself by "getting it all together". Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony.

Absence | Culture | Nothing | Thought | Thought |

Walter Winchell

The same thing happened today that happened yesterday, only to different people.

Mother |

Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong

We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.

Culture |

Washington Irving

A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than a man; because love is more the study and business of her life.

Washington Irving

Such heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst-- Heaven bless the mark!

Death | Distress | Earth | Events | Love | Mother |

Washington Irving

That happy age when a man can be idle with impunity.

Washington Irving

There is certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.

Adversity | Comfort | Disgrace | Glory | Love | Mother | Pleasure | Sacrifice | Surrender | Tenderness | Will | World |

Washington Irving

The very difference of character in marriage produces a harmonious combination.

Washington Irving

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

Adversity | Cause | Friend | Mother | Peace | Trials | Will | Trouble | Friends |

Washington Irving

The man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, and who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts, that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.

Evil | Father | Good | Love | Mother | Promise | Child | Think |

Washington Irving

The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.

Affliction | Agony | Consolation | Duty | Error | Friend | Grief | Love | Meditation | Mother | Present | Sadness | Sorrow | Child |

Washington Irving

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

Evil | Father | Good | Love | Mother | Promise | Child | Think |

Washington Irving

A sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with constant use.

Adversity | Cause | Friend | Mother | Peace | Trials | Will | Trouble | Friends |

Welsh Proverbs

Lighting a candle to search for the midday sun.

Welsh Proverbs

People aren't good unless others are made better by them.

Mother |

Wendell Berry

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

Culture | Man |

Welsh Proverbs

Let not your tongue cut your throat.

Wendell Berry

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

Better | Culture | Excess | Man |

Wendell Berry

If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.

Culture | Force | Generosity | Necessity | People | Sacred | Work |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

Better | Culture |