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

Alain Arias-Misson

The purpose of art is not a rarefied, intellectual distillate - it is life, intensified, brilliant life.

Art | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Art |

Robert Aitken, fully Robert Baker Aitken

The Buddha and all his successors warn us against intellectual structures that confine us to an artificial environment, and against concepts that smear over the living fact of things in themselves. Even the idea of the Buddha must be forgotten.

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali

I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.

Belief | Freedom | God | Heart | Self | God |

J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown

Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist is likely to find that his suggestions have fallen on fertile soil so long as he delivers his message with an eye to the existing attitudes and intellectual level of his audience.

Blame | Enemy | Need | People |

Edwin Arthur Burtt

The mystic vision of God, or ecstasy of felt union with Him, is, to those who attain it, an affair of ravishing emotional intensity, of vivid intellectual illumination, and on both of these counts of supreme value.

Ecstasy | God | Vision |

J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown

Communism and Fascism or Nazism although poles apart in their intellectual content are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.

Authority | Personality | Pleasure |

Seymour Epstein

How well people manage their emotions determines how effectively they can use their intellectual ability.

Ability | Emotions | People |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith is intellectual humility, devotion of the mind, a true offering, the finest feat the heart can perform.

Devotion | Faith | Heart | Humility | Mind |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

That which is `provable’ is not Reality but perception or mentation only. Reality is subjective and knowable only by virtue of identity with the known. “Provables’ belong to the classification and level of limitation and are arbitrary abstractions whose sole `reality’ is merely the consequence of selection and identification. The phenomenal is not the same as the noumenal [understood by intellectual intuition without the aid of the senses – opposed to phenomenon.]

Aid | Intuition | Perception | Reality | Virtue | Virtue |

Stephen Hawking

Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories – the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of this century. The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe (that is the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million miles – the size of the observable universe). Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct.

Force | Phenomena | Size | Theories | Universe |

Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

The lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era... Instead of worshipping supernatural rulers, it will sanctify the higher manifestations of human nature, in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realization of life’s possibilities as a sacred trust.

Art | Era | Human nature | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Religion | Sacred | Trust | Will | Art |

Edward J. Jurji

The contribution of religion to the unity of all human beings is made, not in the intellectual but in the spiritual realm.

Religion | Unity |

John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman

True religion is slow in growth, and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgment; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself: it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.

Growth | Religion |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge… Nothing becomes truly “one’s own” except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice… The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free.

Aid | Effort | Knowledge | Nothing | People | Sacrifice |

Louis Auguste Sabatier

And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.

Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Laurence Steinberg

What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of the rules and no involvement in the decision-making.

Assertion | Authority | Decision | Little | Power |