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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value; for it is the representative of eternity.

Eternity | Present | Wisdom |

Anna Lorette Rose Hawkes

Our past is our heritage, our present is our responsibility, and our future is our destiny.

Destiny | Future | Past | Present | Responsibility | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

People | Present | Religion | Reverence | Soul | Wisdom |

Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

We cannot know as a matter of principle, the present in all its details.

Present | Wisdom |

Heinrich Heine

Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, flowers, water and love. Of course, if the spectator be without the last, the whole will present but a pitiful appearance; and, in that case, the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, the trees are good for fuel, the flowers are classified by stamens, and the water is simply wet.

Appearance | Good | Love | Means | Nature | Present | Will | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The present moment is a powerful deity.

Present | Wisdom |

Huang Po, also Huángbò Xīyùn

On perceiving any individual's mind, you perceive all mind. Glimpse one truth, and all truth is present in your vision, for there is nowhere at all which is devoid of the Truth.

Individual | Mind | Present | Truth | Vision | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

Enjoy the present day, trusting very little to the morrow.

Day | Little | Present | Wisdom |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

They change their sky not their mind who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us.

Change | Happy | Idleness | Life | Life | Mind | Object | Present | Search | Wisdom |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Faith is expectation. Whatever you strongly and consistently expect to come into your life is invariably what you will experience... Faith is always accompanied by strong emotion. Faith can only extend to the self-imposed boundaries of your present consciousness.

Consciousness | Expectation | Experience | Faith | Life | Life | Present | Self | Will | Wisdom |

Elizabeth Klarer

In aging, the (one's) inner clock slows down while earth time remains constant. Your planet continues to move in three directions at the same time, giving to you your speed or flow of time, past, present and future. There is less time to do things as one grows older and time is speeded up because the living body processes are slowing down. Time is a wave-motion in a triple unity with light and gravity.

Body | Earth | Future | Giving | Light | Past | Present | Time | Unity | Wisdom |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up the "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

Man | Nature | Present | Wisdom |

Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy

We know that we are not limited by the accident of our birth or the timing of it, and we recognize the truth that we have always been around. We can reinhabit time and own our story as a species. We were present back there in the fireball and the rains that streamed down on this still molten planet, and in the primordial seas. We remember that in our mother’s womb, where we wear vestigial gills and tail and fins for hands. We remember that. That information is in us and there is a deep, deep kinship in us, beneath the outer layers of our neocortex or what we learned in school. There is a deep wisdom, a bondedness with our creation, and an ingenuity far beyond what we think we have. And when we expand our notions of what we are to include this story, we will have a wonderful time and we will survive.

Accident | Birth | Ingenuity | Mother | Present | Story | Time | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Ingenuity | Think |

Daniel James Marsh

If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.

Present | Television | Wisdom |

John Locke

Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good; and we are then possessed of any good, when we have it so in our power that we can use it when we please... Sorrow is uneasiness in the mind, upon the thought of a good lost, which might have been enjoyed longer; or the sense of a present evil.

Consideration | Evil | Good | Joy | Mind | Power | Present | Sense | Sorrow | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

James Russell Lowell

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

Ancestry | Man | Men | Past | Present | Wisdom |

George Brossin Méré, chevalier de

Beauty is the first present Nature gives to women, and the first it takes away.

Beauty | Nature | Present | Wisdom |