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

Peter W. Jedlicka

There are only three things to teach: Simplicity, patience, and compassion. Simplicity in action and thoughts, will return you to the source of your being. Patience with friends and enemies alike, will give you harmony with the way things are. Compassion with yourself, will settle all the differences between you and other beings in the world.

Action | Compassion | Harmony | Patience | Simplicity | Teach | Will | World | Friends |

Louise J. Kaplan

The toddler must say "no" in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says "no" to assert who she is not.

Avarice | Compassion | Nothing | Parents | People | Pride | Tenderness | Youth | Youth |

Michael Levin

Children first conceive morality as rules for pleasing their parents – only with the fullness of time comes a grasp of the idea of conscientious choice.

Children | Choice | Morality | Parents | Time |

Samuel H. Miller

Faith faces everything that makes the world uncomfortable - pain, fear, loneliness, shame, death - and acts with a compassion by which these things are transformed, even exalted.

Compassion | Death | Faith | Fear | Loneliness | Pain | Shame | World |

Guru Nanak

Make divine knowledge thy food, compassion thy store-keeper, and the voice which is in every heart the pipe to call to repast.

Compassion | Heart | Knowledge |

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman

Human morality is composed of four interconnecting principles: a genetic predisposition toward survival, the neural development of the brain, a social imperative toward group cohesion, and a cognitive propensity to make distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil. Our moral continuum appears to be strongly influenced by the degrees of connectedness we feel with others; the more connected we feel, the more we act with generosity, compassion and fairness.

Compassion | Evil | Fairness | Generosity | Good | Morality | Principles | Right | Survival | Wrong |

Patañjali NULL

Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked.

Calmness | Compassion | Happy | Indifference | Mind |

Maggie Ross, pen name for Martha Reeves

Pain is the source of compassion, and compassion shifts our perspective on pain, which frees us from the fear of death.

Compassion | Death | Fear | Pain |

Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers

There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart.

Cause | Children | Control | Decision | Need | Parents | Responsibility |

Charlene Spretnak

Without nonviolence - mind states of loving kindness and compassion - at the core of our societal construct, however, even the desire to protect and preserve can be manipulated in service to barbarism masquerading as idealism.

Barbarism | Compassion | Desire | Idealism | Kindness | Mind | Service |

Albert Schweitzer

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Compassion | Man | Peace | Will |

Albert Schweitzer

The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Compassion | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Will |

Phil Catalfo

If enough people consider compassion to be important, then the world becomes a more compassionate place.

Compassion | Enough | Important | People | World |

Albert Einstein

Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Beauty | Compassion | Nature |

Patroclus or Patroklos NULL

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guild or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

Beauty | Compassion | Despair | Dogma | Faith | Fear | Hope | Ignorance | Joy | Learning | Love | Optimism | Pessimism | Reason | Selfishness | Sin | Truth | Beauty |