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

Nisargadatta Maharaj, fully Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli

By watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

Acceptance | Attention | Awareness | Character | Consciousness | Freedom | Intelligence | Intention | Life | Life | Mind | Mother | Nature | Understanding | Work | Understand |

Wilhelm Reich

Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than partyline line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians.

Aliveness | Better | Character | Children | Existence | Freedom | Good | Life | Life | Love | Money | Opinion | Public | Security | Will |

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 |

James H. Aughey

The great comprehensive truths, written in letters of living light on every page of our history, are these: Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom; freedom, none but virtue; virtue, none but knowledge; and neither freedom nor virtue has any vigor or immortal hope except the principles of the Christian faith...

Character | Faith | Freedom | History | Hope | Knowledge | Light | Principles | Religion | Security | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |

Joseph Raz

The rule of law is essentially a negative value. The law inevitably creates a great danger of arbitrary power - the rule of law is designed to minimize the danger created by the law itself. Similarly, the law may be unstable, obscure, retrospective, etc., and thus infringe people’s freedom and dignity. The rule of law is designed to prevent his danger as well. Thus the rule of law is a negative virtue in two senses: conformity to it does not cause good except through avoiding evil and the evil which is avoided is evil which could only have been caused by the law itself.

Cause | Character | Conformity | Danger | Dignity | Evil | Freedom | Good | Law | People | Power | Rule | Virtue | Virtue | Danger |

H. F. Rall, fully Harris Franklin

Freedom means mastery of your world. Fear and greed are common sources of bondage. We are afraid, beset by anxiety. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. We seem so helpless over against the forces that move now without apparent thought for men. And our inner freedom is destroyed by greed. We think that if we only had enough goods we should be free, happy, without care. And so there comes the lust for money, and slavery to the world of things. The world can enslave; it can never make us free.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Care | Character | Enough | Fear | Freedom | Greed | Happy | Lust | Means | Men | Money | Slavery | Thought | Tomorrow | Will | World | Think | Thought |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

Freedom does not mean the right to do whatever we please, but rather to do whatever we ought... The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

Character | Freedom | Power | Right |

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 |