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

Philip Doddridge

He is the wisest and happiest man who, by constant attention of thought discovers the greatest opportunity of doing good, and breaks through every opposition that he may improve these opportunities.

Attention | Character | Good | Man | Opportunity | Opposition | Thought | Thought |

Immanual Hermann Fichte

Our system of thought and opinion, is often the only history of our heart. Men do not so much will according to their reason, as reason according to their will.

Character | Heart | History | Men | Opinion | Reason | System | Thought | Will | Thought |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The reason for so much bad science is not that talent is rare - not at all. What is rare is character.

Character | Reason | Science | Talent |

Henry Ford

You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do.

Character | Reputation |

Charles W. Garman

Whatever may be true of men’s creed, nothing is clearer than the fact that the personality and the sovereignty of God are not a large factor in the practical life and thought of our age.

Age | Character | Creed | God | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Personality | Thought | God | Thought |

Jerome P. Fleishman

Do you know what real poverty is? It is never to have a big thought or a generous impulse.

Character | Impulse | Poverty | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Our best hope for the future is that the intellect - the scientific spirit, reason - should in time establish a dictatorship over the human mind. The very nature of reason is a guarantee that it would not fail to concede to human emotions, and to all that is determined by them, the position to which they are entitled. But the common pressure exercised by such a domination of reason would prove to be the strongest unifying force among men, and would prepare the way for further unifications. Whatever, like the ban laid upon thought by religion, opposes such a development is a danger for the future of mankind.

Character | Danger | Emotions | Force | Future | Guarantee | Hope | Mankind | Men | Mind | Nature | Position | Reason | Religion | Spirit | Thought | Time | Danger | Intellect | Thought |

Edgar Z. Friedenberg

Only science can hope to keep technology in some sort of moral order.

Character | Hope | Order | Science | Technology |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.

Action | Capacity | Character | Thought | Thought |

Hans Hoffman

Art and science create a balance to material life and enlarge the world of living experience. Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling.

Art | Balance | Character | Experience | Life | Life | Science | Wisdom | World | Art |

Madame Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon

There are three kinds of silence. Silence from words is good, because inordinate speaking tends to evil. Silence, or rest from desires and passions is still better, because it promotes quietness of spirit. But the best of all is silence from unnecessary and wandering thoughts, because that is essential to internal recollection, and because it lays a foundation for a proper reputation and for silence in other respects.

Better | Character | Evil | Good | Reputation | Rest | Silence | Spirit | Words |

Richard M. Hare, fully Richard Mervyn Hare

It is, most fundamentally, because moral judgments are universablizable that we can speak of moral thought as rational (to universalize is to give the reason); and their prescriptivity is very intimately connected with our freedom to form our own moral opinions (only those free to think and act need a prescriptive language).

Character | Freedom | Language | Need | Reason | Thought | Think | Thought |

Hans Hoffman

A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Character | Meaning | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Thomas Hobbes

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. God and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs and doctrines of men are different.

Character | Conversation | Evil | God | Good | Mankind | Men | Nothing | Philosophy | Science | Society | Society | God |

Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

Character lives in a man, reputation outside of him.

Character | Man | Reputation |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.

Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

What we do depends in large measure upon what we think, and if what we do it evil, there is good empirical reason for supposing that our thought patterns are inadequate to material, mental or spiritual reality.

Character | Evil | Good | Reality | Reason | Thought | Thought |

E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe

A whipping never hurts so much as the thought that you are being whipped.

Character | Thought | Thought |