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 Parker

Our reverence for the past is just in proportion to our ignorance of it.

Character | Ignorance | Past | Reverence |

Nisargadatta Maharaj, fully Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli

By watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

Acceptance | Attention | Awareness | Character | Consciousness | Freedom | Intelligence | Intention | Life | Life | Mind | Mother | Nature | Understanding | Work | Understand |

Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL

It behooves a father to be virtuous if he expects his son to be more virtuous than he has been.

Character | Father |

Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.

Character | Mother |

Publius Syrus

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.

Character | Mother | Solitude |

Henry Gardiner Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Education | Ignorance | Nothing | Wisdom |

Robert C. Winthrop,fully Robert Charles Winthrop

Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise, - all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.

Character | Dignity | Education | Ignorance | Justice | Slavery | Wisdom |

Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock

If choosing freely for oneself is the highest value, the free choice to wear red socks is as valuable as the free choice to murder one’s father or sacrifice oneself for one’s friend. Such a belief is ridiculous.

Belief | Character | Choice | Father | Free choice | Friend | Murder | Sacrifice | Murder |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

Wine-drinking is the mother of all mischief, the root of crimes, the spring of vices, the whirlwind of the brain, the overthrow of the sense, the tempest of the tongue, the ruin of the body, the shame of life, the stain of honesty, and the plague and corruption of the soul.

Body | Corruption | Honesty | Life | Life | Mother | Sense | Shame | Soul | Wisdom |

Ardis Whitman, fully Ardis Rumsey Whitman

Toscanini's eightieth birthday, someone asked his son, Walter, what his father ranked as his most important achievement. The son replied, "For him there can be no such thing. Whatever he happens to be doing at the moment is the biggest thing in his life - whether it is conducting a symphony or peeling an orange."

Achievement | Character | Father | Important | Life | Life |

Eugene P. Bertin, fully Eugene Peter Bertin

Honest work bears a lovely face for it is the father of pleasure and the mother of good fortune. It is the keystone of prosperity and the sire of fame. And best of all, work is relief from sorrow and the handmaiden of happiness.

Fame | Father | Fortune | Good | Mother | Pleasure | Prosperity | Sorrow | Wisdom | Work |

Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"

There in fact four very significant stumbling-blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, long-standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge... there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience.

Authority | Custom | Display | Example | Experience | Ignorance | Knowledge | Man | Title | Truth | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

It is not wisdom but ignorance that teaches men presumption. Genius may sometimes be arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as knowledge.

Genius | Ignorance | Knowledge | Men | Nothing | Presumption | Wisdom |

Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.

Age | Enough | Family | Father | Isolation | Mother | Nature | People | Security | Wisdom | World |