Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Health

"It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"All a child has to do is to learn to abandon ecstasy, to do without awe, to leave fear and trembling behind. Only then can he act with a certain oblivious self-confidence, when he has naturalized his world. We say naturalized but we mean unnaturalized, falsified, with the truth obscured, the despair of the human condition hidden" - Ernest Becker

"Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nine­teenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primi­tive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reli­gions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most." - Ernest Becker

"Some people are more sensitive to the lie of cultural life, to the illusions of the causa-sui project that others are so thoughtlessly and trustingly caught up in. The neurotic is having trouble with the balance of cultural illusion and natural reality; the possible horrible truth about himself and the world is seeping into his consciousness. The average man is at least secure that the cultural game is the truth, the unshakable, durable truth. He can earn his immortality in and under the dominant immortality ideology, period. It is all so simple and clear-cut. But now the neurotic." - Ernest Becker

"I thought I had already paid for everything. Not like women who always pay and pay and pay. There is no principle of reward and punishment. Simple exchange of values. You give something and get something in return. Or do you work for something. Either way, you pay for everything that is worth something. I was redeemed your life a lot of things that I liked, and that's why I felt the joy of life. Things that give you joy of preparing, may be paid in several ways - knowledge, experience, exposure or money. To enjoy life, in order to learn about your money and get something nutritious to enjoy it consciously. Generally, it is possible. The world is a good store." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There are always some things which we do for their own sakes, and there are other things which we do for some other purpose. One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-to-ends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and argument about this." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Child labor must be abolished by the working class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"I hate it in friends when they come too late to help." - Euripedes NULL

"Beloved youth, you will have your trials and temptations through which you must pass, but there are great moments of eternity which lie ahead. You have our love and our confidence. We pray that you will be prepared for the reins of leadership. We say to you, "Arise and shine forth" and be a light unto the world, a standard to others." - Ezra Taft Benson

"Pellerin read every work on ‘sthetics, in order to find out the true theory of the Beautiful, convinced that, when he had discovered it, he would produce masterpieces. He surrounded himself with every imaginable auxiliary?drawings, plaster-casts, models, engravings; and he kept searching about, eating his heart out." - Gustave Flaubert

"Once a definition of congruence is given, the choice of geometry is no longer in our hands; rather, the geometry is now an empirical fact." - Hans Reichenbach

"No one is bound to do impossibilities." - Italian Proverbs

"One who wants to keep their yard tidy does not reserve a plot for the weeds." - Italian Proverbs

"The soldier is well paid for doing mischief." - Italian Proverbs