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

Paul Tyner

For this cause he came into the world; that he might be a witness to the truth; a living, unimpeachable witness of the truth that shall make us free - the truth of man’s religion (reunion) with God, through absolute spiritual self consciousness - with God - with the Eternal, Omnipotent and Omniscient Source and Fountain of Life, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” without whom we are not!

Absolute | Cause | Character | Consciousness | Eternal | God | Life | Life | Man | Religion | Self | Truth | Witness | World | God |

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

Destiny | Love | Wisdom |

Yechiel Michel Tukatinsky

From the perspective of the minuteness of our planet in relationship with the entire universe a person’s seeking honor is ridiculous.

Character | Honor | Relationship | Universe |

Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe

This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.

Books | Character | Comfort | Destiny | Dignity | Ideas | Man | Mockery | Peace | Wisdom | Words | Work |

Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole

I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to life in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not over anxious about your personal place; that makes you tolerant because you realize your own comic fallibility; that gives you tranquillity without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself.

Capacity | Character | Complacency | Consciousness | Earth | Life | Life | Materialism | Tranquility | World | Happiness |

Akon NULL

Mankind is a creature of space, a space race living on a planet in orbit around a star, as others are also doing. Mankind is not unique, as he fondly imagines. He is merely a part of the vast interstellar human family bred and nurtured by us through the eons of time on planets in different solar systems throughout the galaxy.

Family | Mankind | Race | Space | Time | Unique | Wisdom |

Daniel Webster

There is no evil that we cannot either face or fly from but the consciousness of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues us ever.

Character | Consciousness | Duty | Evil | Sense |

Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones

Life itself is the expression of evolution... Everything that exists is merely matter in motion. In the same way, perfection is always a temporary relative motion. Humanity is relative... We are at such a low expression of consciousness that we have not yet seriously studied ourselves... Development is circular... Everything is constantly moving at higher, faster, more refined, complex levels of being... We will be here as quantitative motion until we reach a state of motion that is qualitative, revolutionary. Then we will be somewhere else!

Consciousness | Evolution | Humanity | Life | Life | Perfection | Will | Wisdom |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

From our point of view, life appears in its entirety as an immense wave... which rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of matter.. this rising wave is consciousness... running through human generations, subdividing itself into individuals. This subdivision was vaguely indicated in it, but could not have been made clear without matter. Thus souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity. The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. Consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes... the brain underlines at ever instant the motor indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependence of consciousness and brain is limited to this... consciousness is essentially free.

Body | Consciousness | Humanity | Life | Life | Little | Nothing | Sense | Wisdom |

Bruno Bettelheim

Reading and what it can contribute to one's life is not something that pertains only to the ego and its conscious mind; it is also deeply rooted in the unconsciousness. Those who retain all through life a deep commitment to the literary harbor in their consciousness some residue of their earlier conviction that reading is an art permitting access to magic worlds, although very few of them are aware that they subconsciously believe this to be so.

Art | Commitment | Consciousness | Ego | Life | Life | Magic | Mind | Reading | Unconsciousness | Wisdom | Art |

Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

Whatever task you undertake, do it with all your heart and soul. Always be courteous, never be discouraged. Beware of him who promises something for nothing. Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures. Do not look for approval except the consciousness of doing your best.

Blame | Consciousness | Heart | Nothing | Soul | Wisdom | Approval |

Max Brod

Our destiny repeats itself, because we create it.

Destiny | Wisdom |

Jerry Brown

Protecting something as wide as this planet is still an abstraction for many. Yet I see the day in our own lifetimes that reverence for the natural systems - the oceans, the rain forests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living beings - will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.

Day | Economics | Politics | Reverence | Will | Wisdom |

Brillat-Savarin, fully Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin NULL

The destiny of countries (nations) depends on the way they feed themselves.

Destiny | Nations | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

We are born for a higher destiny than that of earth; there is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars will be spread before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and where the beings that pass before us like shadows will stay in our presence forever.

Destiny | Earth | Will | Wisdom |

Bernard d'Espagnat

The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and the facts established by experiment.

Consciousness | Doctrine | Existence | Experiment | Wisdom | World |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Action | Beginning | Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Inheritance | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Sense | Struggle | War | Wisdom |