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

Margaret Jenkins

Every pupil you have carries in his mind or heart or conscience a bit of you. Your influence, your example, your ideas and values keep marching on - how far into the future and into what realms of our spacious universe you will never know.

Conscience | Example | Future | Heart | Ideas | Influence | Mind | Universe | Will | Wisdom |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.

Death | Endurance | Ideas | Man | Nations | Wisdom |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

We are a great deal more certain that our will is free than that everything that happens is bound to have a cause. This being the case, could we not for once in a way reverse the argument, and say: our ideas of cause and effect must be very inaccurate, for were they right, our will could not be free?

Argument | Cause | Ideas | Right | Will | Wisdom |

Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz

As there is an infinite number of possible universes in the ideas of God, and as only one can exist, there must be sufficient reason for God’s choice, to determine him to one rather than to another. And this reason can only be found in the fitness, or in the degrees of perfection, which these worlds contain.

Choice | God | Ideas | Perfection | Reason | Wisdom |

Walter Lippmann

True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

Ideas | Little | Wisdom |

Walter Lippmann

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

Ideas | Men | Mortal | Wisdom |

John Locke

Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.

Ideas | Mind | Reflection | Regard | Understanding | Wisdom |

Nancy Gentile Ford

You cannot confine an idea behind prison bars... Ideas cannot be shut in nor shut out.

Ideas | Prison | Wisdom |

John Locke

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

Ideas | Wisdom | Words | World |

Maurice Nicoll

The universe is infinite response. Mentally understood, it is all possibilities. Every point of view is possible, and because it ‘exists’ it is right... The universe gives more than we give... Unless one sees the world differently, unless new ideas touch our consciousness we cannot rise to any apprehension of the second system. To all that we know naturally we must add something, and in this volume this addition is taken in terms of adding first the dimension of Time to our own lives and considering what this means for oneself.

Consciousness | Ideas | Means | Right | System | Time | Universe | Wisdom | World |

Moses Mendelssohn

The concepts of morality too are subject to fashion; and he who cannot incline to the ideas in vogue in his century, is misunderstood and decried by his contemporaries.

Ideas | Morality | Wisdom |

Maurice Nicoll

All ideas require preparation for their meaning to engage the soul... There is no question whether they are true or not. One buys for oneself. There is no absolute truth. All truth is relative - relative to one’s needs, relative to one’s position in psychological space.

Absolute | Ideas | Meaning | Position | Question | Soul | Space | Truth | Wisdom |

Maurice Nicoll

Under the illusion of passing-time we can have no unity. To be is to have the permanent sense of something else... For integration, ideas that halt time are necessary, and these ideas must feed us continually... The mystery of time is in ourselves... The mystic ocean of existence is not to be crossed as something outside ourselves. It is in oneself... Every further stage of ourselves is within us, above us... Outside us is outer truth; within us, inner truth, and both make up All - the WORLD.

Existence | Ideas | Illusion | Integration | Mystery | Sense | Time | Truth | Unity | Wisdom | World |

Alex Faickney Osborn

Most ideas are step-by-step children of other ideas.

Children | Ideas | Wisdom |

Alexander Pope

At present we can only reason of the divine justice form what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes, we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life, we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us.

Ideas | Justice | Life | Life | Man | Present | Reason | Wisdom |