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

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.

Abstract | Awareness | Capacity | Desire | Faith | Force | Ideas | Intuition | Knowledge | Lying | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Reality | Reason | Self | Will | Wonder | Awareness |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith is not a miniature of thinking but its model, not its shadow but its root. It is a spiritual force in man, not dealing with the given, concrete, limited, but directed upon the transcendent. It is the spring of our creative actions.

Faith | Force | Man | Model | Thinking |

Stanley Hopper, fully Stanley Romaine Hopper

Poetry will not save the world. But poetry can force the soul into the precincts of its last evasion.

Evasion | Force | Poetry | Soul | Will | World |

Bakola wa Ilunga

Sexuality is a force to be controlled and transformed; its energy must be channeled and educated.

Energy | Force |

David Starr Jordan

The infinite expanse of the universe, its growth through immeasurable periods of time, the boundless range of its changes, and the rational order that pervades it all, seems to demand an infinite intelligence behind its manifestations.

Growth | Intelligence | Order | Time | Universe |

William James

If things are ever to move upward, someone must be ready to take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try nonresistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But nonresistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects.

Charity | Force | Prudence | Prudence | Risk | Will |

Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze

He who by Tao purposes to help a ruler of men will oppose all conquest by force of arms; for such things are wont to rebound.

Conquest | Force | Men | Will |

Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze

Understand that true growth comes from meeting and solving the problems of life in a way that is harmonizing to yourself and to others. If you can follow these simple old ways, you will be continually renewed.

Growth | Life | Life | Problems | Will | Old |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as [the] inner confrontation of opposites.

Consciousness | Growth | Nothing |

Lawrence Kushner

Change begins by not trying to change. What you imagine you must do in order to change yourself is often the very force that keeps you precisely the way you are… Beneath all the layers of wanting to be different, self-dissatisfaction, pretense, charade, and denial is a self. This self is a living, dynamic force within everyone. And if you could remain still long enough here, now, in this very place, you would discover who you are. And by discovering who you are, you would be at last free to discover who you yet also might be.

Change | Dynamic | Enough | Force | Order | Self |

Glenn W. Lehrer

Crystals are like concentrated knowledge pressed into crystalline form. They are the culmination of life force coming together in time and space. The crystal shows nature’s urge for symmetry and perfection. Our life purpose is like that – purposeful curiosity and imagination yearning for balance and beauty.

Balance | Beauty | Curiosity | Force | Imagination | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nature | Perfection | Purpose | Purpose | Space | Time |

Boris Pasternak, fully Boris Leonidovich Pasternak

The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely itself.

Force | Life | Life | Nothing | Soul |

Mohawk Nation NULL

We are shown that our live exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics… We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits an be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter - grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.

Consciousness | Energy | Force | Life | Life | Politics | Spirit |

W. G. Peck, fully William George Peck

The powers of this world, founded upon force and forging ever more perfect weapons of death, will always dismiss Him as impossible.

Death | Force | Weapons | Will | World |