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

Mary Eliza Haweis, aka Mrs. Hugh R. Haweis, maiden name Mary E. Joy

After all, what is vanity? If it means only a certain wish to look one’s best, is it not another name for self-respect? If it means inordinate self-admiration (very rare among persons with some occupation), it is less wicked than absurd.

Absurd | Admiration | Character | Means | Occupation | Respect | Self |

Samson Raphael Hirsch

Suffering is a great teacher. Suffering teaches you the limitations of your power; it reminds you of the frailty of your health, the instability of your possessions, and the inadequacy of your means which have only been lent to you and must be returned as soon as the Owner desires it. Suffering visits you and teaches you the nothingness of your false greatness. It teaches you modesty.

Character | Greatness | Health | Instability | Means | Modesty | Possessions | Power | Suffering |

Hans Hoffman

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Ability | Character | Means | Wisdom |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates.

Character | Good | Means | Men | Reason | Religion | Worship |

William James

The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

Character | Conduct | Means | Truth |

Thomas Jefferson

Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.

Character | Means | Men |

David Hume

Custom is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared I the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.

Action | Character | Custom | Ends | Events | Experience | Future | Influence | Life | Life | Means | Memory | Past | Present | Speculation |

David Hume

It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature. But it is pretended that some causes are necessary, some not necessary.

Cause | Chance | Character | Existence | Means | Nature | Nothing | Power |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Character | Ends | Justify | Means | Nature | Reason |

Juan Ramón Jimenez, fully Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

Character | Desire | Haste | Life | Life | Means | Right | Time |

William James

There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors... Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways... Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Character | Education | Genius | Ideas | Little | Means | Mind | Struggle | Truth | Old |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked.

Character | Conduct | God | Indispensable | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Virtue | Virtue | God |

William James

Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse.

Absence | Character | Faith | Means | Men |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

I have often seen individuals who simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’, revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through the widening of his view, the insoluble problem, lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out in contrast to a new and strong life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so became different itself. What, on a lower level, had led the wildest conflicts and emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality; it means that instead of being in it, one is now above it.

Character | Consciousness | Contrast | Emotions | Experience | Life | Life | Light | Means | Panic | Personality | Reality |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Relationship means contact, communion. There cannot be communion where people are divided by ideas. A belief may gather a group of people around itself. Such a group will inevitably breed opposition and so form another group with a different belief. Ideas postpone direct relationship with the problem.

Belief | Character | Ideas | Means | Opposition | People | Relationship | Will |

Sherman E. Johnson

A man who protects and hoards his life may lose it anyhow. Perhaps to protect it is to lose it in the most real sense of the word, for cowardice means spiritual death.

Character | Cowardice | Death | Life | Life | Man | Means | Sense |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Relationship means to respond. The root meaning of that word, not what we have made of that word, is to respond completely to another, like responsibility. Do we ever respond totally with each other, or it is always a fragmentary response, a partial response?

Character | Meaning | Means | Relationship | Responsibility |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

To most of us, relationship is a term for comfort, for gratification, for security, and in that relationship we use property, ideas, and persons for our gratification. We use belief as a means of security.

Belief | Character | Comfort | Ideas | Means | Property | Relationship | Security |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

Character | Means | Meditation | Wisdom |