Great Throughts Treasury

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

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"Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language." -

"We need to teach the highly educated person that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world." - Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering

"We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together like fools." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour." - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way." -

"Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recognize our personal immortality; men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insignificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator’s hands... before the Eternal and All-Merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for companionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the face of God." - Henry Parry Liddon

"What does it amount to - their expounding the Torah! A man should see to it that all his actions are a Torah and that he himself becomes so entirely a Torah that one can learn from his habits and his motions and his motionless clinging to God." - Rabbi Aryeh Leib, the son of Sarah

"The study of the properties of numbers, Plato tells us, habituate the mind to the contemplation of pure truth, and raises us above the material universe. He would have his disciples apply themselves to this study, not that they may be able to buy or sell, not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or traveling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and fix them on the immutable essences of things." -

"I need my enemy in my community. He keeps me alert, vital... But beyond what we specifically learn from our enemies, we need them emotionally, our psychic economy cannot get along well without them... Our enemy is as necessary for us as is our friend. Both together are part of authentic community." -

"One of the greatest failures of our contemporary training of teachers is that they become mere technicians... They do not learn the beliefs and motives and values for the sake of which the classroom exists." - Alexander Meiklejohn

"Security means inner harmony of the personality with the environment. Man must learn how to balance emotional stress against his own emotional supports. And he must be mature." - William C. Menninger, fully William Claire Menninger

"What we learn with pleasure we never forget." - Alfred Mercier

"Pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn." - Edna St. Vincent Millay

"In dealing with the environment we must learn now how to master nature but how to master ourselves, our institutions, and our technology." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"The divisions and boundaries that we perceive based upon our five senses are, in effect, an illusion. It’s my belief that the meaning of life changes from day to day, second to second. I believe we’re here to learn that we’re part of a creative force - I would go so far as to call that force divine. We’re here to learn that we can create a world and that we have a choice in what we create, and that our world, if we choose, can be a heaven or hell." - Thomas E. O’Connor

"The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. We must learn to shut off the future as tightly as the past." - William Osler, fully Sir William Osler

"One of the most difficult lessons parents have to learn is this one: Children are only loaned for a brief term of infancy and childhood. Soon they become people, strangers in the home, and instead of children to be directed they are grown-ups to be studied, understood and accepted. The acceptance is never quite complete on either side, but affection will bridge the gap if it is permitted to do so." - Angelo Patri

"We learn more from studying happy, healthy people than we can learn from the exclusive study of the sick and stressed." - Paul Pearsall

"Process is more important than product. We must learn to pay more attention to the "how" instead of the "what" we are doing." - Paul Pearsall

"The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. Collect and learn them; they are notable measures of directions for human life; you have much in little they save time in speaking; and upon occasion may be the fullest and safest answers." - William Penn

"Thinking leads man to knowledge. He may see and hear, and read and learn whatever he pleases, and as much as he pleases; he will never know anything of it, except that which he has thought over, that which by thinking he has made the property of his own mind. Is it then saying too much if I say that man, by thinking only, becomes truly man? Take away thought from man's life, and what remains?" - Johann Pestalozzi, fully Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

"He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough." - John Powell, fully Sir John Powell

"It is a good thing to learn caution by the misfortunes of others." - Publius Syrus

"It is in learning music that many youthful hearts learn to love." - Dominique Ricard

"Man can only learn to rise from the consideration of that which he cannot surmount." -

"The Divine Wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it." -

"Life is a system of relations rather than a positive and independent existence; and he who would be happy himself and make others happy must carefully preserve these relations. He cannot stand apart in surly and haughty egotism; let him learn that he is as much dependent others as others are on him." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala

"Thought engenders thought. Place one idea upon paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page. You cannot fathom your mind. It is a well of thought which has no bottom. The more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful will it be. If you neglect to think yourself, and use other people's thoughts, giving them utterance only, you will never know what you are capable of. At first your ideas may come out in lumps, homely and shapeless; but no matter; time and perseverance will arrange and polish them. Learn to think, and you will learn to write; the more you think, the better you will express your ideas." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala

"East can learn from West how to be dynamic and active, while West can learn from East how to be content and serene." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart." -

"Since the beginning of civilization we have explained our existence in terms of what we could observe... Maybe we will discover that the only true reality is a state of mind, shaped by the information we can process and contexts in which we see it. Maybe the Supreme Being we call God can best be appreciated as the power of ultimate understanding. Maybe our destination has always been to learn and grow as we approach the light of ultimate understanding. Only the context of our ability to process information changes." - Frank Scully

"Men learn while they teach." -

"We learn not in the school, but in life." -

"To confide, even though to be betrayed, is much better than to learn only to conceal. In the one case your neighbor wrongs you; but in the other you are perpetually doing injustice to yourself." - William Gilmore Simms

"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success; we often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." - Samuel Smiles

"Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life." -

"Spiritual power is a force which history clearly teaches has been the greatest force in the development of men... Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness, and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of spiritual forces which have hardly been scratched." - Charles P. Steinmetz, fully Charles Proteus Steinmetz, born Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz

"Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not." - Virgil Thomson

"All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." -

"Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like." - Lionel Trilling

"Usually people interested in spiritual development think in terms of the importance of mind, that mysterious, high and deep thing that we have decided to learn about. But strangely enough, the profound and the transcendental are to be found in the factory. It may not fill you with bliss to look at it, it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we have read about, but somehow reality is to be found there in the way in which we relate with everyday problems. If we relate to them in a simple, earthy way, we will work in a more balanced manner, and things will be dealt with properly." - Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

"I cannot be certain not to meet with evil company, but I will be careful not to keep with evil company. I would willingly sort myself with such as should either teach or learn goodness; and if my companion cannot make me better, nor I him good, I will rather leave him ill than he shall make me worse." - Arthur Warwick

"Youngsters and adults cannot learn if information is pressed into their brains. You can teach only by creating interest, by creating an urge to know. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed into it. First, one must create a state of mind that craves knowledge, interest and wonder." - Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

"We do not have to hold on to our identity to survive... We see that no states of mind are solid; they only become solid when we weave them into a story. We discover that opening to the vast open space of awareness does not destroy us. We learn to trust in the unknown as a guide to what is most fresh and alive in the moment." - John Welwood

"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West

"Curiosity is as much the parent of attention as attention is of memory; therefore the first business of a teacher - first not only in point of time, but of importance - should be to excite not merely a general curiosity on the subject of the study, but a particular curiosity on particular points in that subject. To teach one who has no curiosity to learn is to sow a field without ploughing it." - Richard Whately

"The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails." - T. H. White, fully Terence Hanbury White

"Cities have their indispensable purposes, and their charms, not the least of which is that you can be alone in a crowd. But that kind of living alone is an acquired taste, and not for the weak or unfortunate. they are apt to learn that no city’s institutions can provide protective supports like those of an extended family or real community." - George Frederick Will

"Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles of learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient." - Eugene S. Wilson

"Life is a school. There is something new to learn wherever we may be, wherever we may go, wherever we turn." - Walter A. Witt