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

Joseph Campbell

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. A goal is what specifically you intend to make happen. Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Dreams and goals are coming attractions in your life.

Dreams | Goals | Life | Life | Present | Vision |

Joseph Campbell

The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness.

Light | Logic | Meaning | Mind | Vision | World |

Joseph Jaworski

Leadership os communicating the company's Vision and Mission and having the courage to follow it. Companies that endure have a noble purpose.

Courage | Mission | Vision |

Joseph Jaworski

Leadership is communicating the company's Vision and Mission and having the courage to follow it. Companies that endure have a noble purpose.

Courage | Mission | Vision |

Karen Horney, born Danielsen

No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time.

Thinking | Vision |

Julian Baggini

For me, atheism’s roots are in a sober and modest assessment of where reason and evidence lead us. That means the real enemy is not religion as such, but any kind of system of belief that does not respect these limits on our thinking. For that reason, I want to engage with thoughtful, intelligent believers, and isolate extremists. But if we demonise all religion, such coalitions of the reasonable are not possible. Instead, we are likely to see moderate religious believers join ranks with fundamentalists, the enemies of their enemy, to resist what they see as an attempt to wipe out all forms of religious belief.

Belief | Enemy | Evidence | Means | Reason | Religion | Respect | System | Respect |

L. G. Elliott, fully Lloyd George Elliott

Act as though everything you do, rightly or wrongly, accurately or carelessly, may tip the scale of the bigger things of tomorrow for all of us, as indeed every act, potentially, can. Remember Enemies try to break through at the weakest point. Don't let it be on your sector

Tomorrow |

Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL

As long as you have attachment to the body and attachment to objects, fear and suffering will be with you. Therefore, Krishna told Arjuna to develop his discrimination and rid himself of body consciousness. He told him that once he was free of body consciousness he would be able to develop integral vision. Embodiments of Love, Mankind today has three types of vision. The first is body oriented vision, which is totally superficial. When you have this kind of vision you see only the external appearance of others, such as the clothes and the ornaments they wear, their facial features, their body characteristics, their peculiarities of speech, etc. This type of vision is oriented only towards the phenomenal world. The second kind of vision is insightful vision.

Appearance | Body | Consciousness | Fear | Mankind | Suffering | Vision | Will |

L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Though science makes no use for poetry, poetry is enriched by science. Poetry “takes up” the scientific vision and re-expresses its truths, but always in forms which compel us to look beyond them to the total object which is telling its own story and standing in its own rights. In this the poet and the philosopher are one. Using language as the lever, they lift thought above the levels where words perplex and retard its flight, and leave it, at last, standing face to face with the object which reveals itself. Would not all we mean by “communication between mind and mind” be provided for if we suppose that common knowledge comes about, not from our explaining things to one another, but from things explaining themselves in the same terms to us all? Accepting the object as its own interpreter, as its own “medium of communication,” do we not begin to understand what is utterly dark on any other view, how it comes to pass that the resulting knowledge is a common possession?

Knowledge | Language | Mind | Object | Poetry | Science | Story | Thought | Vision | Words | Thought | Understand |

L. G. Elliott, fully Lloyd George Elliott

Act as though everything you do, rightly or wrongly, accurately or carelessly, may tip the scale of the bigger things of tomorrow for all of us, as indeed every act, potentially, can. Remember: Enemies try to break through at the weakest point. Don’t let it be on your sector.

Tomorrow |

L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself he always seems to be doing both. Enough for him that he does it well.

Art | Distinction | Education | Enough | Excellence | Mind | Vision | Work | Excellence | Art |

Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

Absence | Means | News | Nothing | People | Sense | Story | Time | Vision |

Kenneth Burke

It is deplorable, but not tragic, simply to be a victim of circumstance. Sheer victimization is not an assertion - and it naturally makes not for vision but for frustration. The victimizing circumstances, or accidents, seem arbitrary and exorbitant, even silly.

Assertion | Vision | Victim |

Les Brown

It takes someone with a vision of the possibilities to attain new levels of experience. Someone with the courage to live his dreams.

Courage | Vision |

Leszek Kolakowski

That being said, is there anything to say in support of utopian thinking? Everything, if the meaning of the word is somewhat restricted. If utopia means the highest set of values we want to defend and see implemented in social life, nothing prevents us from hanging on to all of them even if we know that they will never be perfectly compatible with each other. If utopia is a regulative idea of the optimum and not an assurance that we have mastered the skill to produce the optimum, then utopia is a necessary part of our thinking. But it would be a puerile fantasy to pretend that we know how to rid the world of scarcity, suffering, hatred, and injustice: nobody knows that. Whatever can be done in softening these conditions can be done only in specific points, on small scales, by inches. That this should be so unacceptable to the genuine utopian mentality which looks for the vision of the Last Day, the great leap, the final battle; everything else seems (and is, indeed) grey, boring, lacking pathos, requiring specific knowledge instead.

Knowledge | Looks | Meaning | Means | Nothing | Skill | Utopia | Vision | Will | World |

Leonard Leeman

All animals have natural enemies except Man, who has himself.

Lillian Whiting

When an object or purpose is clearly held in thought, its precipitation, in tangible and visible form, is merely a question of time. The vision always precedes the realization.

Object | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Vision |

Lucy Maud Montgomery, aka Maud or L.M. Montgomery

Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.

Vision |

Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

Knowledge | Vision | Think |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

Your enemies can kill you, but only your friends can hurt you.

Kill | Friends |