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 Ellery Channing

Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Character | Knowledge | Mind | Reading | Thinking |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Character | Mind | Nothing | Object |

Cassius, fully Gaius Cassius Longinus NULL

To live a life of pleasure is impossible without living a life of virtue and justice.

Character | Justice | Life | Life | Pleasure | Virtue | Virtue |

Yehuda Leib Chasman

It is impossible to remove all desires. But we have the ability to channel our desires from physical and material pleasures to spiritual endeavors... Someone who finds fulfillment in spiritual matters is not being deprived of pleasure. Rather he is gaining more pleasure than is possible in material matters.

Ability | Fulfillment | Pleasure |

Samuel Butler

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever, or amiable.

Care | Character | Good | People | Taste | Thought | Thought |

Yehuda Leib Chasman

The best way to overcome physical desires is to seek pleasure in spiritual maters.

Character | Pleasure |

Yehuda Leib Chasman

Envy is such a part of many people’s personalities that it is not reasonable to expect them to completely eradicate this trait. Rather, they should channel it in a positive direction. Let them envy those with wisdom so they will try to gain more wisdom.

Character | Envy | People | Will | Wisdom |

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon

Anger is the most impotent passion that accompanies the mind of man; it effects nothing it goes about; and hurts the man who is possessed by it more directly than any other against whom it is directed.

Anger | Character | Man | Mind | Nothing | Passion |

John Caird

The monarch of his own mind is the only real potentate.

Character | Mind |

Chazon Ish, named Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz

Physical pleasures can give a person pleasure and happiness to some degree, but this cannot compete with the elevated pleasure that one can derive when one toils in wisdom.

Character | Pleasure | Wisdom | Happiness |

Howard Cosell, fully Howard William Cosell, born Howard William Cohen

Courage takes many forms. there is physical courage, there is moral courage. Then there is a still higher type of courage - the courage to brave pain, to live with it, to never let others know of it and to still find joy in life; to wake up in the morning with an enthusiasm for the day ahead.

Character | Courage | Day | Enthusiasm | Joy | Life | Life | Pain |

William Ellery Channing

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge; and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

Character | Growth | Ignorance | Knowledge | Mind | Nature | Wisdom |

Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith

Scandal is what one-half the world takes pleasure in inventing, and the other half in believing.

Character | Pleasure | Scandal | World |