Great Throughts Treasury

"The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

"The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The strength of the idea of private enterprise lies in this terrifying simplicity. It suggests that the totality of life can be reduced to one aspect—profits." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the way" - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"Babies are thinking and attracting before they are speaking. Even though you are only months old in your physical body, you are a very old and wise Creator, focused in that baby's body." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"Be easy about it. Don't rush into things. Savor them more. Make more plans and be more deliberate and specific about the plans that you are making, and in all that you do, let your dominant intent be to find that which pleasures you as you imagine it. Let your desire for pleasure, your desire for feeling good, be your only guiding light. As you seek those thoughts that feel good, you will always be in vibrational harmony with the Energy that is your Source. And under those conditions, only good can come to you, and only good can come from you." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"In your action, you lose sight of the vision, you lose sight of your trust in the process, and you just bang around in a sense of futility. Hold the vision and trust that the Universe will acclimate to your vision. Hold the vision and trust the process." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"The child is vibrationally receiving your fears, your beliefs, even without your spoken word. If you want to do that which is of greatest value for your child, give thought only to that which you want, and your child will receive only those wanted thoughts." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"There is a Life Stream that flows to you, and this is a Stream of clarity, a Stream of wellness, a Stream of abundance - and in any moment, you are allowing it or not. What someone else does with the Stream, or not, does not have anything to do with how much of it will be left for you." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"What you think about activates a vibration within you." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"When you ask it is given - but at some point you have to stop asking and start expecting." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world." - Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum

"The Greek gods are the crude but telling expression of this absolute conviction that since man is somebody, and not merely something, the ultimate explanation for what happens to him should rest with somebody, and not merely with somethingÂ… Mythology is not the first step on the path to true philosophy. In fact, it is no philosophy at all. Mythology is a first step on the path to true religion: it is religious in its own right." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

"It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is." - Eugene Peterson

"The only cure for cynicism is to bring it out behind the scenes. It is a parasite on faith. The reason that many of us donÂ’t ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts." - Eugene Peterson

"It is Mystery -- the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event -- or accident -- in any life on earth ... [that] I want to realize in the theatre. The solution, if there ever be any, will probably have to be produced in a test tube and turn out to be discouragingly undramatic." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"When men make gods, there is no God!" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Where the rainbows play in the flying spray," - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"The working class must be employed by the working class." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"Poverty possesses this disease, that through want it teaches man to do evil." - Euripedes NULL

"By the quality of our inner lives I do not mean something characterized by ferocious intensity and strain. I mean rather such a humble and genial devotedness as we find in the most loving of the saints. I mean the quality which makes contagious.. the love of God from you." - Evelyn Underhill

"Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality, with all its difficulties, opportunities, and implications. The true subject matter of religion is not our own little souls, but the Eternal God and His whole mysterious purpose, and our solemn responsibility to Him." - Evelyn Underhill

"He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal." - Gustave Flaubert

"Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart." - Gustave Flaubert

"The complete encounter with the Lord will mark an end to history, but it will take place in history." - Gustavo Gutiérrez

"For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods." - Hannah Arendt

"No one ever became poor through giving alms." - Italian Proverbs

"One good word quenches more heat than a bucket of water." - Italian Proverbs

"The fear of war is worse than war itself." - Italian Proverbs

"The lone sheep is in danger of the wolf." - Italian Proverbs

"The tongue goes to where the tooth aches." -

"I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly