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

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Character | Darkness | Existence | Light | Purpose | Purpose |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate individuality of a particular living being. Personality is an act of the greatest courage in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, and the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom of personal decision.

Absolute | Character | Courage | Decision | Existence | Freedom | Individual | Individuality | Life | Life | Personality |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going down on one's knees and thanking him.

Character | Existence | God |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it.

Character | Existence | Illusion | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | World |

Chief Luther Standing Bear

The attempted transformation of the Indian by the white man and the chaos that has resulted are but the fruits of the white man’s disobedience of a fundamental and spiritual law. “Civilization” has been thrust upon me since the days of reservations, and it has not added one whit to my sense of justice, to my reverence for the rights of life, to my love of truth, honesty, and generosity, or to my faith in Wakan Tanka, God of the Lakotas. For after all the great religions have been preached and expounded, or have been revealed by brilliant scholars, or have been written in fine books and embellished in fine language with finer covers, man - all man - is still confronted with the Great Mystery.

Books | Character | Civilization | Disobedience | Faith | Generosity | God | Honesty | Justice | Language | Law | Life | Life | Love | Man | Mystery | Reverence | Rights | Sense | Truth | God |

George Henry Lewes

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstances, it would be nearer the mark to say man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance.

Character | Circumstances | Existence | Man |

Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

An ardent love and admiration of virtue seems to imply the existence of something opposite to it, and it seems highly probably that the same beauty of form and substance, the same perfection of character could not be generated without the impressions of disapprobation which arise from the spectacle of moral evil.

Admiration | Beauty | Character | Evil | Existence | Love | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty |

John Locke

The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition. The existence of a God, reason clearly makes known to us, as has been shown. The knowledge of existence of any other thing we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connection of real existence with any idea a man hath in his memory; nor of any other existence but that of God with the existence of any particular man: no particular man can know the existence of any other being but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. For, the having the idea of anything in our mind, no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history.

Character | Existence | God | History | Intuition | Knowledge | Man | Memory | Mind | Reason | World | God |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

There is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that of objects. And we, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.

Change | Character | Existence | Judgment | Mortal | Nothing |

Madame de Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de Motteville

Laughter, indeed, is God’s therapy... in order that we might understand that at the heart of our mortal existence there lies a mystery, at once unutterably beautiful and hilariously funny.

Character | Existence | God | Heart | Laughter | Mortal | Mystery | Order | Understand |

Maurice Nicoll

Death is a fact in our natural reality - that is, in our sense-given experience of life - and as long as we cannot understand that we apprehend though the senses only a minute part of total existence and reality, we cannot escape from the violent effect of its suggestion.

Character | Death | Existence | Experience | Life | Life | Reality | Sense | Understand |

Harold Oxley

A great man is one who has conquered himself. He has brought order, discipline and meaning into his life and prevented it from becoming the aimless, self-centered, repulsive existence to which he is drawn by his inherited weaknesses. The process begins when a man brings a center of interest into his life. This interest must be something inspiring and elevating. If you push these requirements far enough, the center of his life can only be God.

Character | Discipline | Enough | Existence | God | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Order | Self |

Pierre Louis Roederer

True purity of taste is a quality of the mind; it is a feeling which can, with little difficulty, be acquired by the refinement of intelligence; whereas purity of manners is the result of wise habits, in which all the interests of the soul are mingled and in harmony with the progress of intelligence. That is why the harmony of good taste and of good manners is more common than the existence of taste without manners, or of manners without taste.

Character | Difficulty | Existence | Good | Harmony | Intelligence | Little | Manners | Mind | Progress | Purity | Refinement | Soul | Taste | Wise |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.

Character | Consciousness | Existence | Judgment | Man | Opinion | Receive |

John A. Sanford, aka Jack

To try to be good, and disregard one's darkness, is to fall victim to the evil in ourselves whose existence we have denied.

Character | Darkness | Evil | Existence | Good | Victim |

Alan William Smolowe

People can only exhibit freedom in proportion to their comprehension of existence and grander realities.

Character | Existence | Freedom | People |

Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that, whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn.

Character | Circumstances | Existence | Life | Life | Will | Youth | Youth | Afraid |