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

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

If we conceive of some point of time which cannot be divided into even the minutes parts of moments, that is the only point that can be called present: and that point flees at such lightning speed from being future to being past, that it has no extent of duration at all.

Future | Past | Present | Time | Wisdom |

George Gissing, fully George Robert Gissing

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience.

Children | Day | Experience | Familiarity | Life | Life | Time | Wisdom |

Elizabeth Klarer

In aging, the (one's) inner clock slows down while earth time remains constant. Your planet continues to move in three directions at the same time, giving to you your speed or flow of time, past, present and future. There is less time to do things as one grows older and time is speeded up because the living body processes are slowing down. Time is a wave-motion in a triple unity with light and gravity.

Body | Earth | Future | Giving | Light | Past | Present | Time | Unity | Wisdom |

Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

For everything there is a time, so there comes a time for the unfolding of the soul - but the period of that development depends upon the speed of the progress man makes through life.

Life | Life | Man | Progress | Soul | Time |

Charles Caleb Colton

It is adverse to talent to be consorted and trained up with inferior minds and inferior companions, however high they may rank. The foal of the racer neither finds out his speed nor calls out his powers if pastured out with the common herd, that are destined for the collar and the yoke.

Rank | Talent |

John Milton

Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race, call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours, whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace; and glut thy self with what thy womb devours, which is no more than what is false and vain, and merely mortal dross; so little is our loss, so little is thy gain.

Little | Mortal | Race | Self | Time |

Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

The key to the art of prayer is thought. As we think so we pray. The highest level of prayer is to think God’s thoughts after Him, to attune our lives to love, hope, faith, justice, kindness; to become open channels for the goodness of God. Prayer is quiet meditation about eternal values. It is the mind adventuring in the universe. Prayer moves with the instantaneous speed of thought, through infinite space, to the four corners of the earth, to the depth of the human heart, to the mountaintop of inspiration.

Art | Earth | Eternal | Faith | God | Heart | Hope | Inspiration | Justice | Kindness | Love | Meditation | Mind | Prayer | Quiet | Space | Thought | Universe | Art | Think |

David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm

Matter, as it were, is condensed or frozen light… all matter is a condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at average speeds which are less than the speed of light.

Light |

Edward R. Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

Elizabeth Klarer

Our Universe is everlasting, creating the light of eternity within its electromagnetic field, creating light in the atmospheres of planets, heat and life, in the velocity of rotation and speed in orbit about the metagalaxy, a prodigious system within the depths of intergalactic void, the limitless reaches of outer space where the minimum-temperature controls the lives of galaxies, as they orbit in continuous momentum, in ever widening circles, about the nucleus, or electromagnetic hub of the metagalaxy.

Eternity | Light | Space | System | Universe |

Freeman John Dyson

The success of Apollo was mainly due to the fact that the project was conceived and honestly presented to the public as an international sporting event and not as a contribution to science. The order of priorities in Apollo was accurately reflected by the first item to be unloaded after each landing on the Moon's surface, the television camera. The landing, the coming and going of the astronauts, the exploring of the moon's surface, the gathering of Moon rocks and the earthward departure, all were expertly choreographed with the cameras placed in the right positions to make a dramatic show on television. This was to me the great surprise of the Apollo missions. There was nothing surprising in the fact that astronauts could walk on the Moon and bring home Moon rocks. There were no big scientific surprises in the chemistry of the Moon rocks or in the results of magnetic and seismic observations that the astronauts carried out. The big surprise was the quality of the public entertainment that the missions provided. I had never expected that we would see in real time astronauts hopping around in lunar gravity and driving their Rover down the Lincoln- Lee scarp to claim a lunar speed record of eleven miles per hour. Intensive television coverage was the driving force of Apollo. Von Braun had not imagined the possibilities of television when he decided that one kilohertz would be an adequate communication bandwidth for his Mars Project.

Entertainment | Force | Nothing | Order | Public | Right | Success | Television | Time |

Jeremy Rifkin

The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.

Age | Energy | Life | Life | Man | Woman |

Jim Rohn

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn't need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

Education | Need | Wrong |

Jeane Kirkpatrick

The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.

Policy |

Lewis Thomas

This is the element that distinguishes applied science from basic. Surprise is what makes the difference. When you are organized to apply knowledge, set up targets, produce a usable product, you require a high degree of certainty from the outset. All the facts on which you base protocols must be reasonably hard facts with unambiguous meaning. The challenge is to plan the work and organize the workers so that it will come out precisely as predicted. For this, you need centralized authority, elaborately detailed time schedules, and some sort of reward system based on speed and perfection. But most of all you need the intelligible basic facts to begin with, and these must come from basic research. There is no other source. In basic research, everything is just the opposite. What you need at the outset is a high degree of uncertainty; otherwise it isn't likely to be an important problem. You start with an incomplete roster of facts, characterized by their ambiguity; often the problem consists of discovering the connections between unrelated pieces of information. You must plan experiments on the basis of probability, even bare possibility, rather than certainty.

Challenge | Important | Need | Plan | Reward | Science | System | Time | Will | Work |

Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat

As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man?s intelligence may remain unaltered; and yet the instruments that he uses will increase and improve, the language that fixes and determines his ideas will acquire greater breadth and precision and, unlike mechanics where an increase of force means a decrease of speed, the methods that lead genius to the discovery of truth increase at once the force and the speed of its operations.

Discovery | Force | Genius | Ideas | Intelligence | Language | Means | Men | Mind | Precision | Strength | Truth | Will | Precision | Discovery | Truths | Understand |

Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash

The speed of the leader is the speed of the gang.

Leader |