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

Albert Einstein

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Enough | Imagination | Important | Knowledge | World |

Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz

There is nothing more common than to hear of men losing their energy on being raised to a higher position, to which they do not feel themselves equal.

Energy | Men | Nothing | Position |

Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Energy |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The interpretation of dreams is the via regia [i.e., royal road] to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life.

Dreams | Knowledge | Life | Life |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.

Energy | Freedom | Reform | Will |

Leonard Felder

The process of forgiveness allows you to turn your heart toward healing, release, and compassion instead of using your energy for revenge or punishment. Forgiveness allows you to build something positive in the present while still making sure not to repeat what happened in the past.

Compassion | Energy | Forgiveness | Heart | Past | Present | Punishment | Revenge | Forgiveness |

Leonard Felder

A passionate translation of the Sh’ma: Sh’ma: listen, or wake up. Yisroel: you who seek to understand and connect with God. Adonai: the Eternal One who has been present since the beginning of time and who expresses love and wisdom by entering our hearts and our world as Eloheynu: our God. Adonai Ekhad: this Eternal energy is the unity within and between all things.

Beginning | Energy | Eternal | God | Love | Present | Time | Unity | Wisdom | World | Understand |

James W. Fowler III

Religious faith must link us to communities of shared memory and shared hope with which we can join in symbolizing our human condition and in enacting the visions that can animate give new life. Religious faith cannot be reduced to the ethical or to the merely utilitarian. But, as part of this larger and indispensable contribution that religious faith can provide to making and keeping life human, it needs also to be held accountable for the renewal and extension of a universal covenant with being. It needs to be held accountable for its broader contribution to good faith on earth.

Earth | Faith | Good | Hope | Indispensable | Life | Life | Memory |

James W. Fowler III

Religious faith must enable us to face tragedy and finitude in the devastating and bewildering particular forms they come to us without giving in to despair or morbidity.

Despair | Faith | Giving | Tragedy |

Sidney Greenberg

A waste far more worthy of our tears is the enormous energy within us that never gets channeled, the love that is never expressed, the kindness that never surfaces, the compassion and tenderness that are never awakened.

Compassion | Energy | Kindness | Love | Tears | Tenderness | Waste |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

In visions of wisdom, in devotion to the good, in submission to beauty, and when overwhelmed by the holy, we awake to behold existence in this relationship. In reverence, suffering, and humility we discover our existence and find the bridge that leads from existence to God. And this is religion.

Beauty | Devotion | Existence | God | Good | Humility | Relationship | Religion | Reverence | Submission | Suffering | Wisdom |

Allan J Hamilton

Could the mind have an existence entirely independent of the central nervous system?... Scientific evidence that not only was her brain not working, it specifically demonstrated the absence of all cortical activity when these conversations actually took place. So where could these brand-new memories have been created?... Imagine the implications of the notion that quanta of conscious energy could exist independently in the Universe, able to enter from anywhere, at any time.

Absence | Energy | Evidence | Existence | Mind | System | Time | Universe |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

The human world represents a purgatorial-like range of opportunities and choices, from the most grim to the exalted, from criminality to nobility, from fear to courage, from despair to hope, and from greed to charity. This if the purpose of the human experience is to evolve, then this world is perfect just as it is.

Charity | Courage | Despair | Experience | Fear | Greed | Hope | Nobility | Purpose | Purpose | World |

Sidney Greenberg

The most fateful choices are made in tragic loneliness. In the valley of decision, we stand alone, accompanied by our haunting fears and our stubborn hopes, by dread despair or gritty faith. Yet, though we appear to stand solitary, in truth we are accompanied by the tall and brave spirits who have stood where we stand and who, when torn between “No” and “Yes” to life and its infinite possibilities; by those who have had the wisdom to focus not on what they had lost but on what they had left; by those who understood that fate is what life gives us and that destiny is what we do with what’s given; and by those who, therefore, grasped the liberating truth that while we have no control over our fate, we do have an astonishing amount of control over our destiny.

Control | Decision | Despair | Destiny | Dread | Faith | Fate | Focus | Life | Life | Loneliness | Truth | Wisdom | Fate |

Václav Havel

We are living at a time when humankind can face whatever threatens it only if we, by which I mean each of us, manage to revive, with new energy and new ethos, a sense of responsibility for the rest of the world.

Energy | Responsibility | Rest | Sense | Time | World |

David Hockey

The first molecular complex able to sustain an energy-transfer process unchanged, using energy extracted exclusively from the external environment, became the first living entity.

Energy |

Julian Jaynes

O what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all - what is it?

Consciousness | Counsel | Mind | Nothing | Study | Will | World |

Stanley Hoffmann and Inge Hoffmann

It is only in the depths of crisis and despair that the fear of losing one’s personality breeds millennial hopes of rescue: otherwise, complacency prevails.

Complacency | Despair | Fear | Personality | Crisis |

Bakola wa Ilunga

Sexuality is a force to be controlled and transformed; its energy must be channeled and educated.

Energy | Force |

Herman Hesse

God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to a new life.

Despair | God | Kill | Life | Life | Order |