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

Henry Van Dyke

How hard it is to confess that we have spoken without thinking, that we have talked nonsense. How many a man says a thing in haste and heat, without fully understanding or half meaning it, and then, because he has said it, holds fast to it, and tries to defend it as if it were true! But how much wiser, how much more admirable and attractive it is when a man has the grace to perceive and acknowledge his mistakes! It gives us assurance that he is capable of learning, of growing, of improving, so that his future will be better than his past.

Better | Future | Grace | Haste | Learning | Man | Meaning | Nonsense | Past | Thinking | Understanding | Will |

John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls

The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.

Eternity | Grace | Heart | Individual | Principles | Purity | Self | Thought | World | Thought |

John Milton

The end... of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection.

Faith | God | Grace | Knowledge | Learning | Love | Parents | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | God |

Joseph Wood Krutch

Few people have ever tried seriously to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional forms and ceremonies.

Desire | Good | Grace | Life | Life | Loyalty | Loyalty | People |

Karl Barth

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

God | Grace | Laughter |

Joseph Campbell

Hell is the place of people who could not yield their ego system to allow the grace of a transpersonal power to move them.

Ego | Grace | Hell | People | Power | System |

Karl Rahner

Those who insist that mystical experience is not specifically different from the ordinary life of grace (as such) are certainly right.

Experience | Grace | Life | Life | Mystical | Right |

Joseph Hall

Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.

Concealment | Grace | Knowledge |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

As the grace of man is in the mind, so the beauty of the mind is eloquence.

Beauty | Grace | Man | Mind | Beauty |

Martin Luther

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his faith’. Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressible sweet in greater love.

Day | Faith | God | Grace | Hate | Justice | Love | Meaning | Mercy | Paradise | Righteousness | Scripture | God |

Marsilio Ficino

The convivium is rest from labours, release from cares and nourishment of genius; it is the demonstration of love and splendour, the food of good will, the seasoning of friendship, the leavening of grace and the solace of life... Everything should be seasoned with the salt of genius and illumined by the rays of mind and manners.

Genius | Good | Grace | Life | Life | Love | Manners | Mind | Rest | Will |

Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

To produce real moral freedom, God’s grace and man’s will must cooperate. As God is the Prime Mover of nature, so also he creates free impulses toward himself and to all good things. Grace renders the will free that it may do everything with God’s help, working with grace as with an instrument which belongs to it. So the will arrives at freedom through love, nay, becomes itself love, for love unites with God.

Freedom | God | Good | Grace | Love | Man | Nature | Will | God |

P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

The dispute between the theory of a predestined future and the theory of a free future is an endless dispute. This is so because both theories are too literal, too rigid, too material, and the one excludes the other... The opposites are both equally wrong because the truth lies in the unification of these two opposite understandings into one whole. At any given moment all the future of the world is predestined and existing - provided no new factor comes in. And a new factor can only come in from the side of consciousness and the will resulting from it.

Consciousness | Dispute | Future | Theories | Truth | Will | World | Wrong |

Plato NULL

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity — I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

Beauty | Good | Grace | Harmony | Mind | Simplicity | Style |

Plato NULL

Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without principles.

Principles |

Plato NULL

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I meant he true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for folly?

Beauty | Character | Folly | Good | Grace | Harmony | Mind | Simplicity | Style |

Plato NULL

Then I must surely be right in saying that we shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognize the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations.

Greatness | Honor | Men | Qualities | Right | Will | Wisdom |

Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Change | Courage | Distinguish | God | Grace | Serenity | Wisdom |