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

Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn

Heaven is not a place or a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect oneness.

Awareness | Awareness |

J. R. Miller, fully James Russell Miller

A true home is one of the most sacred of places. It is a sanctuary into which men flee from the world’s perils and alarms. It is a resting-place to which at close of day the weary retire to gather new strength for the battle and toils of tomorrow. It is the place where love learns its lessons, where life is schooled into discipline and strength, where character is molded.

Battle | Character | Day | Discipline | Life | Life | Love | Men | Sacred | Strength |

Jacob Needleman

Time disappears into outer action or inner impulses. Into doings, cravings, or dreamings. But human time is conscious time. And this has been lost, destroyed. In its place there is now animal time (doing, moving about, preying on others, eating, building, killing, etc. ); plant time (dreaming, languishing, imagining); or “mineral” — that is, mechanical — time: the time of devices such as clocks and computers. What we call logical thinking is often just an internal version of these lifeless machines. Implicitly, we even take pride in the mechanicity of our thinking when, forgetting the metaphorical origin of the usage, we refer to a computer’s “intelligence.” This is mental time, “mineral” in its rigidity and sterility. We lay this logical cement over organic life out there and in ourselves. Carried to its extreme, this becomes the mindset that measures the whole of human life solely by the “bottom line.

Action | Life | Life | Organic | Pride | Thinking | Time |

Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as [we] are free to ask what [we] must, free to say what [we] think, free to think what [we] will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.

Dogma | Doubt | Error | Freedom | Life | Life | Science | Think |

Jacob Needleman

To search means, first, I need Being, Truth; second, I do not know where to find it; and third, an action takes place that is not based on fantasies of certainty— while at the same time a waiting takes place that is rooted not in wishful thinking but in a deep sense of urgency

Action | Need | Search | Sense | Thinking | Time | Waiting |

Ivy Baker Priest

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.

World |

James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

Nature | Religion | World |

Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

Light |

James Hillman

The culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world?

Children | Culture | Will |

James L. Hymes, Jr.

Added man-made failure really hurts young children [under six]. No one has to contrive lessons for these youngsters so that they will learn how to lose—they are losers too much of the time. No one has to put them in their place—they know all too well in their hearts the little place they are in. No one has to cut them down to size—their size is painfully small. At this stage in their development we are wise to stay away from competition, from games and races and contests with winners and losers. It matters too much to each child to come in first—they cannot stand the risk of competition.

Children | Failure | Little | Risk | Size | Will | Wise | Failure | Child | Learn |

James Luther Adams

Church is a place where you get to practice what it means to be human.

Means | Practice |

James Madison

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Control | Government | Men | Government |

Jeremy Rifkin

We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.

Enough | Technology |

Joel A. Barker

A leader is a person you will follow to a place you wouldn't go by yourself.

Will | Leader |

Jeane Kirkpatrick

What takes place in the Security Council more closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an effort at problem-solving.

Effort | Security |

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill.

Children | Family | Life | Life | People | Survival | Work | Worship | Learn |

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

Birth | Democracy |

John Calvin

If heaven is our country, what is the earth but a place of exile? If the departure out of the world is but an entrance into life, what is the world but a sepulchre? What is a continuance in it but an absorption in death?

Earth | Heaven | World |

Jean Shinoda Bolen

I think people don't place a high enough value on how much they are nurtured by doing whatever it is that totally absorbs them.

Enough | People | Think | Value |