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

Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Attention | Focus | Taste | Universe |

Katy Butler

For millennia, shamans and witch doctors... made no distinction between physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. To them, all symptoms were signs of something awry in the individual’s relationship with the larger universe of spirits and animal powers.

Distinction | Individual | Relationship | Universe |

Edgar Sheffield Brightman

If a person believes that the only approach to truth is the approach of the laboratory, he will never be able to find a spiritual God. God is a property of the universe as a whole, and not of its observable parts.

God | Property | Truth | Universe | Will | God |

Walter L. Bradley

The mathematical odds of assembling a living organism are so astronomical that nobody still believes that random chance accounts for the origin of life. Even it you optimized the conditions, it wouldn’t work. If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the most rapid rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be one chance in 10 with 60 zeros after it… The probability of linking together just one hundred amino acids to create one protein molecule by chance would be the same as a blindfolded man finding one marked grain of sand somewhere in the vastness of the Sahara Desert – and doing it not just once, but three different times.

Chance | Earth | Life | Life | Man | Universe | Work |

L. Francis Edmunds

The universe appears to us in two opposite parts, I and World. We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as soon as consciousness first dawn on us… Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we begin again to find the unity out of which we have separated ourselves… Our thinking links us to the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves and thus makes us individuals.

Consciousness | Dawn | Thinking | Thought | Unity | Universe | World |

Albert Einstein

Only two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former.

Stupidity | Universe |

Paul Davies

In spite of the fact that religion looks backward to revealed truth while science looks forward to new vistas and discoveries, both activities produce a sense of awe and a curious mixture of humility and arrogance in practitioners. All great scientists are inspired by the subtlety and beauty of the natural world that they are seeking to understand. Each new subatomic particle, every unexpected object, produces delight and wonderment. In constructing their theories, physicists are frequently guided by arcane concepts of elegance in the belief that the universe is intrinsically beautiful.

Arrogance | Awe | Beauty | Belief | Elegance | Humility | Looks | Object | Religion | Science | Sense | Theories | Truth | Universe | World | Beauty |

James W. Douglass

I believe that there is, that there must be, a spiritual reality corresponding to E=mc2 because from the standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete without it, and because, from the standpoint of moral freedom, humankind is sentenced to extinction without it.

Freedom | Harmony | Reality | Universe |

L. Francis Edmunds

The essence of reality lies in the interiority contained by the universe at a given moment.

Reality | Universe |

Max Ehrmann

After the day’s struggle there is no freedom like unfettered thoughts, no sound like the music of silence. And though behind you lies a road of dust and heat and discouragement, and before you the challenge and uncertainty of untried paths, in this brief hour you are master of all highways, and the universe nestles in your soul.

Challenge | Day | Freedom | Music | Silence | Soul | Sound | Struggle | Uncertainty | Universe |

Baron d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, born Paul Heinrich Dietrich

The universe shows us nothing save an immense and unbroken chain of cause and effect.

Cause | Nothing | Universe |

Arthur Clutton-Brock

So long as we see the universe in the relation of use to ourselves, it remains cold, indifferent, meaningless to us; but when we see it in relation to God, sharing the life which is God, but sharing it even more imperfectly than ourselves, then the process of nature is no longer a meaningless intimidating mechanism, but pathetic and forgivable to us even as we are to ourselves.

God | Life | Life | Nature | Universe |

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.

System | Universe |

Shakti Gawain

The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.

Reward | Universe | Will |

Emmet Fox

The law of the universe is thought first, and then expression; and never can this law be reversed.

Law | Thought | Universe | Thought |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

As totality is implied in every part, so is the value of the universe involved in every event, in every phenomenon.

Universe | Value |