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

Ahikar or Ahiqar NULL

The beauty of man is in his faithfulness, and his hatefulness is the lying of his lips.

Beauty | Character | Lying | Man | Beauty |

Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himsefl without love he gives away his passions and coarse pleasuures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himsefl. The man wholies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone.

Character | Distinguish | Love | Lying | Man | Men | Order | Respect | Truth | Respect |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Self-knowledge leading to self-hatred and humility, is the condition of the love and knowledge of God. Spiritual exercises that make use of distractions have this great merit, that they increase self-knowledge. Every soul that approaches God must be aware of who and what it is. To practice a form of mental or vocal prayer that is, so to speak, above one’s moral station is to act a lie: and the consequences of such lying are wrong notions about God, idolatrous worship of private and unrealistic phantasies and (for lack of the humility of self-knowledge) spiritual pride.

Character | Consequences | God | Humility | Knowledge | Love | Lying | Merit | Practice | Prayer | Pride | Self | Self-hatred | Self-knowledge | Soul | Worship | Wrong | God |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

Character | Lying |

Thomas Paine

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Belief | Character | Chastity | Lying | Man | Infidelity | Happiness |

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

He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man’s child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Life | Life | Lying | Man | Possessions | Wisdom | Child |

Horace Bushnell

God made sin possible just as he made all lying wonders possible, but he never made it a fact, never set anything in his plan to harmonize with it. Therefore it enters the world as a forbidden fact against everything that God has ordained.

God | Lying | Plan | Sin | Wisdom | World | God |

John Locke

Wit lying most in the assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity.

Ideas | Lying | Wisdom | Wit |

William Penn

When thou are obliged to speak, be sure to speak the truth; for equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying is the whole way to hell.

Equivocation | Hell | Lying | Truth | Wisdom |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.

Abstract | Awareness | Capacity | Desire | Faith | Force | Ideas | Intuition | Knowledge | Lying | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Reality | Reason | Self | Will | Wonder | Awareness |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness.

Absence | Art | Cruelty | Discipline | Freedom | Ignorance | Inactivity | Lying | Murder | Treachery | War | Weapons | Words | World | Art |

Alan Curtis Kay

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.

Battle | Books | Lying | Time | Teacher |

Aristotle NULL

Virtue... is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

Character | Choice | Lying | Man | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |

Benjamin De Casseres

The art of survival is the art of lying to yourself heroically, continuously, creatively. The senses lie to the mind; the mind lies to the senses. The truth-seeker is a liar; he is hunting for happiness, not truth.

Art | Lying | Mind | Survival | Truth | Art |