Great Throughts Treasury

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

Perfection

"The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God." - Thomas Merton

"The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life." - Thomas Merton

"We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony." - Thomas Merton

"For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire." - Thomas Paine

"Before The Rain - We knew it would rain, for all the morn A spirit on slender ropes of mist Was lowering its golden buckets down Into the vapory amethyst. Of marshes and swamps and dismal fens-- Scooping the dew that lay in the flowers, Dipping the jewels out of the sea, To sprinkle them over the land in showers. We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed The white of their leaves, the amber grain Shrunk in the wind--and the lightning now Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain!" - Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them." - William Blake

"All merit ceases the moment we perform an act for the sake of its consequences. Truly, in this respect "we have our reward."" - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life." - Wilhelm Reich

"I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"There's a man in the world who is never turned down, wherever he chances to stray; he gets the glad hand in the populous town, or out where the farmers make hay; he's greeted with pleasure on deserts of sand, and deep in the aisles of the woods; wherever he goes there's a welcoming hand-he's the man who delivers the goods." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Absence and death are the same -- only that in death there is no suffering." - Walter Savage Landor

"I will send love, but I will remove myself physically from their presence because I am too divine and significant to be the subject of any abuse." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so." - Wallace Stevens

"I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day. Readers are born free and ought to remain free." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Most of us are not aware of our motivations for living or our priorities for action. We drift with the tides of societal fashions, floating in and out of social concerns at the whim of societal dictates and on the basis of images created by the media or superficial, personal desires to be helpful, useful persons. We are used to living at the surface, afraid of the depths, and therefore our actions and concerns about humanity are shallow, fragile vessels easily damaged. Ultimately most of us are concerned chiefly with our small lives, our collection of sensual pleasures, our personal salvation, and our anxiety about sickness and death, rather than the misery created by collective indifference and callousness." - Vimala Thakar

"Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

"The best way to know life is to love many things." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"This fire has confused the schemes that are in your mind; it shall blow you from your home, blow you away from everywhere." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"It is our heart to determine the rank of our interests, and our reason to drive." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"The perfection of a pendulum is not to go fast, but to be resolved." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"The philosophy has its modes such as clothes, music and architecture." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"The most we can get out of life is its discipline for ourselves, and its usefulness for others." - Tryon Edwards

"Beauty passes, wisdom remains. (Used to make a point that wisdom matters more than physical beauty.)" - Turkish Proverbs

"The secret I learned early on from my father was to run scared and never think I had it made. I never felt I was completely adequate to the job and always ran scared. The fundamental for our success was running scared." - Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.

"Character shows itself apart from genius as a special thing. The first point of measurement of any man is that of quality." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"But truer stars did govern Proteus' birth; his words are bonds, his oaths are oracles, his love sincere, his thoughts immaculate, his tears pure messengers sent from his heart, his heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth. Two Gentlemen from Verona, Act ii, Scene 7" - William Shakespeare

"Desire of having is the sin of covetousness. Twelfth Night, Act v, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare

"Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - William James

"Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light." - William Law

"If [we] have no chosen the kingdom of God [first], it will make in the end no difference what [we] have chosen instead." - William Law

"Piety requires us to renounce no ways of life where we can act reasonably, and offers what we do to the glory of God." - William Law

"There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him." - William Law

"We can all call to mind movements which have begun as pure upsurges of fresh spiritual vitality, breaking through and revolting against the hardened structure of the older body, and claiming, in the name of the Spirit, liberty from outward forms and institutions. And we have seen how rapidly they develop their own forms, their own structures of thought, of language, and of organization. It would surely be a very unbiblical view of human nature and history to think -- as we so often, in our pagan way, do -- that this is just an example of the tendency of all things to slide down from a golden age to an age of iron, to identify the spiritual with the disembodied, and to regard visible structure as equivalent to sin. We must rather recognize here a testimony to the fact that Christianity is, in its very heart and essence, not a disembodied spirituality, but life in a visible fellowship, a life which makes such total claim upon us, and so engages our total powers, that nothing less than the closest and most binding association of men with one another can serve its purpose." - William Law

"Open as day for melting charity." - William Shakespeare

"ORSINO: For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, more longing, wavering, sooner lost and won, than women's are… For women are as roses, whose fair flow'r being once display'd doth fall that very hour. VIOLA: And so they are; alas, that they are so! To die, even when they to perfection grow!" - William Shakespeare

"ORSINO: How dost thou like this tune? VIOLA: It gives a very echo to the seat where love is throned." - William Shakespeare

"We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we'll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there's no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don't at least marginally understand our home." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"I thought that prattling boys and girls would fill this empty room; that my rich heart would gather flowers From childhood's opening bloom. One child and two green graves are mine, this is God's gift to me; a bleeding, fainting, broken heart— This is my gift to Thee." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

"A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission." - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

"Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her along to the bitter end of the miserable existence she'd made for herself. They never even knew what she did die of. Some spoke of a chill. But the truth was that she died from poverty, from the filth and the weariness of her wretched life." - Emile Zola

"Occasionally, we receive questions as to the propriety of Church members receiving government assistance instead of Church assistance. Let me restate what is a fundamental principle. Individuals, to the extent possible, should provide for their own needs. Where the individual is unable to care for himself, his family should assist. Where the family is not able to provide, the Church should render assistance, not the government." - Ezra Taft Benson

"Statesmen and Philanthropists are busy suggesting remedies for the cure of these great evils. But the renovation of our Civil Service, the reform of our Primaries, and whatever other measures may be devised, they all depend in the last instance upon the fidelity of those to whom their execution must be entrusted. They will all fail unless the root of the evil be attacked, unless the conscience of men be aroused, the confusion of right and wrong checked, and the loftier purposes of our being again brought powerfully home to the hearts of the people." - Felix Adler