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

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the chief wall of defense around property and life. With the progress of society, this power of opinion is taking the place of arms.

Defense | Judgment | Life | Life | Men | Opinion | Power | Progress | Property | Society | Wisdom | World |

Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

Cause | Example | Mother | Truth | Wisdom | Witness | Instruction |

Midge Decter, fully Midge Rosenthal Decter

The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the... ecological chain of birthing, growing and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.

Children | Culture | Judgment | Society | Terror | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Youth |

Albert Einstein

The school should always have as its aim that the young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist. This in my opinion is true in a certain sense even in technical schools.... The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.

Ability | Judgment | Knowledge | Man | Opinion | Personality | Sense | Thinking | Wisdom |

John Florio

Night is the mother of thoughts.

Mother | Wisdom |

Fazang, also Fa-Tsang or Fāzàng NULL

The universal of an atom containing emptiness and existence. This means that the atom has no intrinsic nature, so it is empty; yet its illusory characteristics are evident, so it is existent. Indeed, because illusory form has no essence, it must be no different from emptiness, and real emptiness contains qualities permeating to the surface of existence. Seeing that form is empty produces great wisdom and not dwelling in birth-and-death; seeing that emptiness is form produces great compassion and not dwelling in nirvana. When form and emptiness are nondual, compassion and wisdom are not different; only this is true seeing.

Birth | Compassion | Death | Existence | Means | Nature | Qualities | Wisdom |

William Farquhar

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Invention | Mother | Necessity | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.

Art | Judgment | Life | Life | Opportunity | Wisdom |

Pope Leo I, aka Pope Leo The Great, Pope Saint Leo I NULL

Peace is the first thing the angels sang. Peace is the mark of the sons of God. Peace is the nurse of love. Peace is the mother of unity. Peace is the rest of blessed souls. Peace is the dwelling place of eternity.

Angels | Eternity | God | Love | Mother | Peace | Rest | Unity | Wisdom | Blessed |

Ellen Goodman

The figures prove that the absolute easiest way to be poor is to be born out of wedlock to a young woman. If you need a statistic to memorize, try this one: 92.8 percent of all children in black, single female-headed families where the mother is under thirty and did not complete high school, are in poverty.

Absolute | Children | Mother | Need | Poverty | Wisdom | Woman |

Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman

It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much.

Business | Capitalism | Crime | Government | Individual | Judgment | Wisdom | Wrong | Government | Value |

Washington Irving

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth.

Feelings | Fidelity | Mother | Society | Strength | Truth | Wisdom | Child |

Thomas Hobbes

Leisure is the mother of philosophy... The source of every crime , is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions... And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Crime | Error | Force | Leisure | Life | Life | Man | Mother | Philosophy | Understanding | Wisdom |

Richard Hooker

Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is thy bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things do her homage, the very least as feeling her care; and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.

Angels | Care | God | Harmony | Joy | Law | Men | Mother | Peace | Power | Wisdom | World |

William Dean Howells

A man never sees all that his mother has been to him till it's too late to let her know that he sees it.

Man | Mother | Wisdom |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

We are not only made in God’s image, but that we are made to image God - to reflect His freedom, joy, compassion and peace in our lives... When religion becomes reduced to an outward observation of rules and ceremonies and an intolerance toward the beliefs of others, we are mistaking the oyster for the pearl. The oyster is certainly valuable, but it is of infinitely greater value when it promotes the growth of the pearl... We cannot reason our way back to the roots of religion. We cannot trap God in stale dogmas or narrow creeds. Our purpose is to make religion a continuous living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead but of the living who are dead to their own truth. Then religion becomes a thread that can both link us to the past and guide us to our future.

Compassion | Experience | Freedom | Future | God | Growth | Intolerance | Joy | Observation | Past | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Religion | Truth | Wisdom | God | Value |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Judging only by outer appearances is a mistake, because things are rarely what they seem... Disapproval of a person is disapproval of God. There is a great difference between being judgmental and using good judgment. You have to love each person’s divine essence, but you do not have to like someone’s inappropriate behavior. Wrong judgment impedes your spiritual growth.

Behavior | God | Good | Growth | Judgment | Love | Mistake | Wisdom | Wrong |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

Judgment | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Intellect | Understand |