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

Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart of life, and is prophetic of eternal good.

Character | Duty | Eternal | Good | Grace | Heart | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Right | Soul | Truth |

Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL

Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.

Character | Duty | Eternal | Good | Grace | Heart | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Right | Soul | Truth |

Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

The goal of wisdom is laughter and play - not the kind that one sees in little children who do not yet have the faculty of reason, but the kind that is developed in those who have grown mature through both time and understanding. If someone has experienced the wisdom that can only be heard from oneself, learned from oneself, and created from oneself, he does not merely participate in laughter: he becomes laughter itself.

Character | Children | Laughter | Little | Play | Reason | Time | Understanding | Wisdom |

Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL

Let honor be to us as strong an obligation as necessity is to others.

Character | Honor | Necessity | Obligation |

Wilhelm Reich

Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than partyline line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians.

Aliveness | Better | Character | Children | Existence | Freedom | Good | Life | Life | Love | Money | Opinion | Public | Security | Will |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To serve God is not to pass our lives on our knees in prayer; it is to discharge on earth those obligations which our duty requires.

Character | Duty | Earth | God | Prayer | God |

Francis Quarles

If thou desire to see thy child virtuous, let him not see his father’s vices; thou canst not rebuke that in children that they behold practiced in thee; till reason be ripe, examples direct more than precepts; such as thy behavior is before they children’s faces, such commonly is theirs behind their parents backs.

Behavior | Character | Children | Desire | Father | Parents | Reason | Rebuke | Child |

Red Cloud, fully Maȟpíya Lúta in Lakota NULL

Look at me - I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches, but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.

Character | Children | Good | Love | Peace | Riches | Right | World | Riches |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.

Character | Duty | Gratitude | Right |

Sydney Smith

That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward.

Better | Character | Charity | Duty | Future | God | Hope | Ingratitude | Labor | Looks | Man | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Work | World | God |

John Augustus Shedd

Simply having children does not make mothers.

Character | Children |

Yisroel Salanter Lipkin

Even though we personally should do what we can to flee from honor, we still have an obligation to treat other people with honor and respect.

Character | Honor | Obligation | People | Respect |

Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

Whatever you would have your children become, strive to exhibit in your own lives and conversation.

Character | Children | Conversation |

Samuel Smiles

Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one’s duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic.

Character | Duty | Life | Life | Men | Nothing |

Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children also educate us?

Character | Children | Wisdom |

Robert Southey

A good man and a wise man may, at times, be angry with the world, and at times grieved for it; but no man was ever discontented with the world if he did his duty in it.

Character | Duty | Good | Man | Wise | World |