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

William Blake

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

Desire | Man |

William Blake

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

Desire | Despair | Eternal | Man | Universe |

Washington Irving

I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow.

Battle | Heart | Man | Skill |

Wendell Berry

So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years... Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts... Practice resurrection.

Force | Life | Life |

Wallace Stevens

Say that it is the serenade of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Desire | Love | Nothing | Will |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

Era | Struggle | World |

Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views.

Art | Important | Life | Life | Politics | Question | Art |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

Children | Love | Opportunity | Soul |

Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL

The three greatest concerns of men are these: to make him who is an enemy a friend, to make righteous him who is wicked, and to make the ignorant learned.

Design | Evil | Good | Spirit | Thought | Words | Teacher | Thought |

Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

But self-renunciation means God-possession, the being possessed by God. Out of utter humility and self-forgetfulness comes the thunder of the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord." High station and low are leveled before Him. Be not fooled by the world's power. Imposing institutions of war and imperialism and greed are wholly vulnerable for they, and we, are forever in the hands of a conquering God. These are not cheap and hasty words. The high and noble adventures of faith can in our truest moments be seen as no adventures at all, but certainties. And if we live in complete humility in God we can smile in patient assurance as we work. Will you be wise enough and humble enough to be little fools of God? For who can finally stay His power? Who can resist His persuading love? Truly says Saint Augustine, "There is something in humility which raiseth the heart upward."

Business | Competition | Desire | Discernment | God | Growth | Habit | Humility | Important | Life | Life | Little | Looks | Meekness | Money | Nothing | Obedience | Poverty | Pride | Self | Soul | Superiority | Trifles | Will | Business | God |

Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans, because I am by instinct a teacher and I would like to teach them something.

Receive |

Thucydides NULL

For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.

Love |

Thucydides NULL

In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies, on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains.

Applause |

Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.

Complacency | Property |

William Godwin

For there is such a thing as a broken spirit.

Authority | Censure | Energy | Indulgence | Man | Nothing | Quiet | Reality | Reason | Silence | Virtue | Virtue | Will |

William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

Achievement |

William James

It is a fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some kind of consciousness is always going on. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential problem, of our science.

Reality |

William Havard

Comfort--'tis for ease and quiet; it sleeps upon the down of sweet content, in the sound bed of industry and health.

Plenty |

William Law

Piety requires us to renounce no ways of life where we can act reasonably, and offers what we do to the glory of God.

Perfection | Piety | Pleasure | Progress | Reality | Reason | Receive | Religion | Wonder |

William Law

If there be nothing so glorious as doing good, if there is nothing that makes us so like God, then nothing can be so glorious in the use of our money as to use it all in works of love and goodness.

Ends | Hope | Ideas | Religion | World |