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

V. S. Seturaman

The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.

Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |

Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL

Our purpose is to live in harmony with those cycles [birth, growth, death and regeneration] to develop our peculiar organs of consciousness and creativity to add to the beauty, love, humor, diversity and general interest of the world.

Beauty | Birth | Consciousness | Creativity | Death | Diversity | Growth | Harmony | Humor | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom | World |

Carol Adrienne

People who are happy have found an internal harmony by participating fully in the world from the platform of their strengths and passions, having come somewhat to terms with their foibles and weakness.

Happy | Harmony | People | Weakness | World |

Henri Frédéric Amiel

The eternal truth is not the future life; it is life in harmony with the true order of things - life in God.

Eternal | Future | God | Harmony | Life | Life | Order | Truth |

Romano Guardini

My being known by God is my reality, and I become real in the measure that my life and action are in harmony with the knowledge of God.

Action | God | Harmony | Knowledge | Life | Life | Reality | God |

Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

The doctrine of original sin is a theological perversion of natural fact. It is a fact that all human beings begin life with an equipment of instincts, impulses, and desires, at war with one another and often out of harmony with the realities of eth physical, social, and spiritual world. Sin and the sense of sin will always be with us, to torture and weigh down; but… the religion of the future will try to prevent men’s being afflicted with the sense of sin, rather than encourage it, and then attempt to cure it.

Doctrine | Future | Harmony | Life | Life | Men | Religion | Sense | Sin | Torture | War | Will | World |

Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum

One must marry one's feelings to one's beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one's life.

Feelings | Harmony | Ideas | Life | Life |

Peter W. Jedlicka

There are only three things to teach: Simplicity, patience, and compassion. Simplicity in action and thoughts, will return you to the source of your being. Patience with friends and enemies alike, will give you harmony with the way things are. Compassion with yourself, will settle all the differences between you and other beings in the world.

Action | Compassion | Harmony | Patience | Simplicity | Teach | Will | World | Friends |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

The Bible is the record of man’s efforts to find God and learn how to live in harmony with his laws.

Bible | God | Harmony | Man | God | Bible | Learn |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

Anarchism (from the Greek… contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – Harmony in such a society not being obtained by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted form the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.

Authority | Conduct | Government | Harmony | Law | Life | Life | Obedience | Society | Submission | Society | Government |

Bibhuti Mazumder

Love is the creative power of the universe that manifests as strength and beauty. To love is to know God and the inmost nature of the ultimate Reality… Love is letting go of fear and worry… Love consecrates life… By letting go of separateness we see love as the reflection of our own self and harmony in the inconsistencies and imperfections of the existence and explore joy in the midst of the pains and problems of life.

Beauty | Existence | Fear | God | Harmony | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Power | Problems | Reality | Reflection | Self | Strength | Universe | Worry | God |

Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin

The Taoist solution was to get oneself in harmony with the Way or Tao of the universe, to learn to move through the world with flexibility and fluidity according to the nature of things, rather than fighting it, ourselves, or other people.

Fighting | Flexibility | Harmony | Nature | People | Universe | World | Flexibility | Learn |

Leonard E. Read

An expansion of the individual consciousness toward a harmony with Infinite Consciousness demands of the individual that he take on, commensurately, other characteristics of his Creator.

Consciousness | Harmony | Individual |

Josiah Royce

Because God is One, all our lives have various and unique places in the harmony of the divine life. And because God attains and wins and finds this uniqueness, all our lives win in our union with him the individuality which is essential to their true meaning.

God | Harmony | Individuality | Life | Life | Meaning | Unique | God |