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

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

We are, I believe, at the moment in grave danger of missing the 'path to perfection'.

Ability | Consciousness | Ego | Knowledge | Man | Nothing |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

The gulf between this thoughtful mind of civilized man and the thoughtless animal soul of the savage is enormous -- greater than the gulf that separates the latter from the soul of the dog.

Action | Choice | Doctrine | Inheritance | Man | Organic | Survival | Will |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the captalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion.

Obligation | Order | Loss |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].

Children | Kill | Men | Rights |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Make fun of death. We are as dead as it gets, and we are fully aware of this joyous experience. We are with you every time you allow it. We are in every singing bird and in every joyful child. We are part of every delicious pulsing in your environment. We are not dead, and neither will you ever be. You will just get up one day, and get out of the movie.

Good |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The law of attraction is most understood when you see yourself as a magnet getting more and more of the way you FEEL.

Achievement | Attainment | Body | Joy | Money | Possessions | Property | Success |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Some say that you should not want money at all because the desire for money is materialistic and not spiritual. But we want you to remember that you are here in this very physical world where Spirit has materialized. You cannot separate yourself from the aspect of yourself that is spiritual, and while you are here in these bodies, you cannot separate yourselves from that which is physical or material. All the magnificent things of a physical nature that are surrounding you are Spiritual in nature.

Individual | Power | Right | World | Wrong |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

We judge the objects to touch only because we have learned to judge. In fact, if we consider the size of an object, we see that it is relative to that of other objects, so we have to compare it with and judge the extent to which these differ from them, if we want to get an idea of its size, and so for ideas of substance, of shape and weight. In other words, all the ideas that come from touch presuppose the comparison and judgment.

Action | Rest |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

I can do what I want, but the trouble is that I do not quite know what to do.

Enjoyment | Love | Man | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Eugene Peterson

The Bible is not a script for a funeral service, but it is the record of God always bringing life where we expected to find death. Everywhere it is the story of resurrection.

People | Present |

Eugen Herrigel

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Aims | Art | Awareness | Experience | Individual | Meaning | Means | Mind | Nothing | Power | Practice | Present | Reflection | Spirit | Work | Art | Awareness |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Any goal of a natural desire is legitimate, it inspires all means are good.

Enemy |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.

Love | Man | Melancholy | Pain | Pleasure | Sense |

Eudora Welty

My tendency is to believe that all experience is an enrichment instead of an impoverishment.

Pain | Pleasure | Think |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

If I am not for myself the right to life, which has given the company?

Pain |

Eugen Herrigel

This state, in which nothing definite is thought, planned, striven for, desired or expected, which aims in no particular direction and yet knows itself capable alike of the possible and the impossible, so unswerving is its power - this state, which is at bottom purposeless and egoless, was called by the Masters truly 'spiritual'. It is in fact charged with spiritual awareness and is there also called 'right presence of mind'. This means that the mind or spirit is present anywhere, because it is nowhere attached to any particular place. And it can remain present because, even when related to this or that object, it does not cling to it by reflection and thus lose its original mobility. Like water filling a pond, which is always ready to flow off again, it can work its inexhaustible power because it is free, and be open to everything because it is empty. This state is essentially a primordial state, and its symbol, the empty circle, is not empty of meaning for him who stands within it. Out of the fullness of this presence of mind, disturbed by no ulterior motive, the artist who is released from all attachment must practice his art. But if he is to fit himself self-effacingly into the creative process, the practice of the art must have the way smoothed for it. For if, in his self-immersion, he saw himself faced with a situation into which he could not leap instinctively, he would first have to bring it to consciousness. He would then enter again into all the relationships from which he had detached himself; he would be like one weakened, who considers his program for the day, but not like an Awakened One who lives and works in the primordial state. It would never appear to him as if the individual parts of the creative process were being played into his hands by a higher power; he would never experience how intoxicatingly the vibrancy of an event is communicated to him who is himself only a vibration, and how everything that he does is done before he knows it.

Consciousness |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us.

Dirty | Little | Marriage | Pain | Play | Time | Ugly | Think |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

Men | Poverty | Child |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

There are rational proofs by which we can know with certitude that God exists; but the certitude of faith, which is based on the infallibility of the word of God, is infinitely more reliable than all knowledge acquired by natural reason alone, no matter how evident it may be. In matters of revelation, error is absolutely impossible because the source of the knowledge of faith is God Himself, who is the Truth.

God | Men | God |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

And yet it is not always in our power to revive the perceptions we have felt. On some occasions the most we can do is by recalling to mind their names, to recollect some of the circumstances atr tending them, and an abstract idea of perception; an idea which we are capable of framing every instant, because we never think without being conscious of some perception which it depends on ourselves, to render genera).

Happy | Ideas | Imagination | Men | Reason |