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

Leroy Brownlow

There are times when silence has the loudest voice.

Silence |

Dave Tyson Gentry

True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.

People | Silence | Friendship |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

By negligence and silence we have all become accessory before the God of mercy to the injustice committed against the Negroes by men of our nation.

God | Injustice | Injustice | Men | Mercy | Silence | God |

Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal

Prayer is an expression of man’s inner yearning for a response in the awful silence of the universe. It is a unique process of discovery whereby the searching ego affirms itself in the very moment of self-negation, and thus discovers its own worth and justification as a dynamic factor in the life of the universe.

Discovery | Dynamic | Ego | Justification | Life | Life | Man | Prayer | Self | Silence | Unique | Universe | Worth | Discovery |

Frank Charles Laubach

Prayer is likely to be undervalued by all but wise people because it is silent and so secret. We are often deceived into thinking that noise is more important than silence. War sounds far more important than the noisesless growing of a crop of what, yet the silent wheat feeds millions, while war destroys them. Nobody but God knows how often prayers have changed the course of history... The highest communion is not asking God for things for ourselves, but letting Him flow down through us, out over the world - in endless benediction.

God | History | Important | Noise | People | Prayer | Silence | Thinking | War | Wise | World | God |

F. Malava

That soul is not idle which, holding itself in the presence of God, keeps interior silence… For the will to keep silence is an act of veneration.

God | Silence | Soul | Will |

Ronald Lewin, fully George Ronald Lewin

In terms of… intelligence operations, noise is the buzz set up by competing information signals which prevents the essential message from being heard loud and clear.

Intelligence | Noise |

Thomas Merton

My only task is to be what I am, a man seeking God in silence and solitude, with respect for the demands and realities of his own vocation, and fully aware that others too are seeking the truth in their own way.

God | Man | Respect | Silence | Solitude | Truth | Respect | God |

Thomas Merton

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Despair | Joy | Life | Life | Music | Phenomena | Reality | Sadness | Silence |

George Herbert Morrison

A love that has no silence has no depth. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” There are people whose love we instinctively distrust because they are always telling us about it. And perhaps it is simply because God is love, in all the glorious fullness of that word, that we have to be still if we would know him.

Distrust | God | Love | People | Protest | Silence | God |

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

To get at the transcendent within oneself, one must break through one’s normal self. We must impose silence on our familiar self, if the spirit of God is to become manifest in us. The divine is more deeply in us than we are ourselves.

God | Self | Silence | Spirit | God |

Francis Quarles

The voice of humility is God’s music and the silence of humility is God’s rhetoric.

God | Humility | Music | Rhetoric | Silence |