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

Plotinus NULL

It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation.

Beauty | Character | Consciousness | Love | Soul | Sound |

Bachya Ibn Pekudah

The earth we live on is so small that even if someone was honored by everyone on our planet it is still insignificant. Also, a person’s lifetime is so short that even if he received honor and approval his entire life, it is so short in comparison with eternity. This is the ultimate success an approval-seeker can hope for, but the reality is that even if you spend you entire life trying to win the approval of others, only a small number of people will know and approve of you. The approval you do gain lasts a very short time and is soon forgotten as if it never was.

Character | Earth | Eternity | Honor | Hope | Life | Life | People | Reality | Success | Time | Will | Approval |

Richardson Pack or Packe

There is nothing a man can less afford to leave at home than his conscience or his good habits; for it is not to be denied that travel is, in its immediate circumstances, unfavorable to habits of self-discipline, regulation of thought, sobriety of conduct, and dignity of character. Indeed, one of the great lessons of travel is the discovery how much our virtues owe to the support of constant occupation, to the influence of public opinion, and to the force of habit; a discovery very dangerous, if it proceed from an actual yielding to temptations resisted at home, and not from a consciousness of increased power put forth in withstanding them.

Character | Circumstances | Conduct | Conscience | Consciousness | Dignity | Discipline | Discovery | Force | Good | Habit | Influence | Man | Nothing | Occupation | Opinion | Power | Public | Regulation | Self | Thought | Yielding | Discovery |

Nisargadatta Maharaj, fully Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli

By watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

Acceptance | Attention | Awareness | Character | Consciousness | Freedom | Intelligence | Intention | Life | Life | Mind | Mother | Nature | Understanding | Work | Understand |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The hatred of the wicked is only roused the more from the impossibility of finding any just grounds on which it rest; and the very consciousness of their own injustice is only a grievance the more against him who is the object of it.

Character | Consciousness | Impossibility | Injustice | Injustice | Object | Rest |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.

Character | Consciousness | Existence | Judgment | Man | Opinion | Receive |

Walt Rostow, fully Walt Whitman Rostow, aka W.W. Rostow

An awful lot of life on this planet is one man’s assessment of the other.

Character | Life | Life | Man |

Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

You sow the seeds of your destiny through the way you think, the way you plan, the way you fantasize, the way you deal with fellow beings.

Character | Destiny | Plan |

Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways.

Body | Character | Earth | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul |

Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

The aim that comedy has in view is the same as that of the highest destiny of man, and this consists in liberating himself from the influence of violent passions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds him, and also of his own being, and of seeing everywhere occurrence rather than fate or hazard, and ultimately rather smiling at the absurdities than shedding tears and feeling anger at sight of the wickedness of man.

Anger | Character | Comedy | Destiny | Fate | Hazard | Influence | Man | Tears | Wickedness | Fate |

Albert Schweitzer

Wherever there is lost the consciousness that every man is an object of concern for us just because he is a man, civilization and morals are shaken, and the advance to fully developed inhumanity is only a question of time.

Character | Civilization | Consciousness | Inhumanity | Man | Object | Question | Time |

Moira Timms

Raising one's consciousness and raising one's vibration are synonymous.

Character | Consciousness |

John Greenleaf Whittier

The tissue of Life to be we weave with colors all our own, and in the field of Destiny we reap as we have sown.

Character | Destiny | Life | Life |