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

Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II

Hence, it is true to say that the citizens of earth and heaven are united in the celebration of this Council. The role of the saints in heaven is to supervise our labors; the role of the faithful on earth, to offer concerted prayer to God; your role, to show prompt obedience to the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit and to do your utmost to answer the needs and expectations of every nation on earth. To do this you will need serenity of mind, a spirit of brotherly concord, moderation in your proposals, dignity in discussion, and wisdom in deliberation. God grant that your zeal and your labors may abundantly fulfill these aspirations. The eyes of the world are upon you; and all its hopes.

Acceptance | Accuracy | Doctrine | Joy | Meaning | Means | Mind | Need | Precision | Present | Serenity | Spirit | Time | Will | Work | Precision | Truths |

Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

The march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.

Doctrine | Little | Receive |

Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?

Doctrine | Men | Work |

Rush Limbaugh

None of what Barack Obama is doing or wants to do to this country is anything the rest of the world hasn't seen before and already failed at.

Disagreement | Doctrine | Fairness | Neutrality | Search | Think |

Saint Bonaventure, born John of Fidanza Bonaventure

The One so good and so great desires you to embrace him and is waiting to embrace you.

Abstract | Doctrine | Eternal | Glory | God | Heart | Isolation | Life | Life | Light | Means | Nature | God |

John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom

Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for the highest divine concepts.

Correctness | Doctrine | Learn |

Samuel Gompers

You are our employers not our masters. Under the system of government we have in the United States, we are your equals, and we contribute as much, if not more, to the success of industry than do the employers.

Doctrine | Effort | Force | Men | Principles | Suffering | Will |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

No mind is much employed upon the present: Recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

Doctrine | Right | Society | Teach | Society |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

No teaching could be more direct than just to sit down.

Belief | Doctrine | God | Will | God |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

I don't know is the first principle. Do you understand? The first principle cannot be known in terms of good or bad, right or wrong, because it is both right and wrong.

Belief | Doctrine | God | Will | God |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash.

Doctrine | Experience | Little |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

I think you're all enlightened, until you open your mouths.

Belief | Doctrine | God | Important | Time | Will | God |

Simone Weil

A man thinks he is dying for his country, said Anatole France, but he is dying for a few industrialists. But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

Doctrine | Indispensable | Purpose | Purpose |

Simone Weil

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

Character | Control | Crime | Doctrine | Evil | Good | Government | Knowledge | Man | Obligation | Power | Public | Society | System | Society | Government |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.

Abstract | Art | Assertion | Death | Doctrine | Earth | Ethics | Evil | Existence | Existentialism | Good | Guarantee | Heaven | Individual | Justify | Life | Life | Love | Man | Men | Need | Paradise | Pride | Reason | Salvation | System | Thinking | Time | Truth | Universe | Weakness | Will | Work | World | Art | Old | Value |

Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

But in the case of man, hard as it is for him to learn how to submit to rule, it seems far harder to know how to rule over men, and hardest of all, with this rule of ours, which leads them by the divine law, and to God, for its risk is, in the eyes of a thoughtful man, proportionate to its height and dignity. For, first of all, he must, like silver or gold, though in general circulation in all kinds of seasons and affairs, never ring false or alloyed, or give token of any inferior matter, needing further refinement in the fire; or else, the wider his rule, the greater evil he will be. Since the injury which extends to many is greater than that which is confined to a single individual… nothing is so easy as to become evil, even without any one to lead us on to it; while the attainment of virtue is rare and difficult, even where there is much to attract and encourage us.

Body | Church | Day | Doctrine | Fear | God | Grace | Innovation | Judgment | Love | Neglect | Novelty | Present | Protest | Safe | Spirit | Strength | Will | Novelty | God | Think |

Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian

To say the truth, I go so far as to praise and congratulate them. Yea! would that I were one of those who contend and incur hatred for the truth’s sake: or rather, I can boast of being one of them. For better is a laudable war than a peace which severs a man from God: and therefore it is that the Spirit arms the gentle warrior, as one who is able to wage war in a good cause.

Doctrine | Pious | Soul | Truth | Wrong |

Stephan Jay Gould

A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between external forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and internal forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development—what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called laws of form.

Doctrine | Good | Reason | Sacred | Science | Trust | Understanding | Understand |

Stephan Jay Gould

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

Doctrine | Good | Reason | Sacred | Science | Trust | Understanding | Understand |

Stephen Charnock

He hath willed everything that may be for our good, if we perform the condition he hath required; and hath put it upon record, that we may know it and regulate our desires and supplications according to it. If we will not seek him, his immutability cannot be a bar, but our own folly is the cause; and by our neglect we despoil him of this perfection as to us, and either imply that he is not sincere, and means not as he speaks; or that he is as changeable as the wind, sometimes this thing, sometimes that, and not at all to be confided in. If we ask according to his revealed will, the unchangeableness of his nature will assure us of the grant; and what a presumption would it be in a creature dependent upon his sovereign, to ask that which he knows he has declared his will against; since there is no good we can want, but he hath promised to give, upon our sincere and ardent desire for it.

Conquest | Doctrine | Folly | Illusion | Reason | Thought | Weakness | World | Thought |