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

Abraham Isaac Kook

The uniqueness of the inner soul, in its own authenticity – this is the highest expression of the seed of divine light, the light planted for the righteous, from which will bud and blossom the fruit of the tree of life.

Authenticity | Life | Life | Light | Soul | Will |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

I believe in immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. I believe that the state we enter after death is wrought of our own motives, thoughts, and deeds... I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.

Death | Deeds | Faith | Heart | Immortality | Joy | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Magic | Motives | Soul |

John Locke

He that takes away reason, to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both.

Light | Reason | Revelation |

James A. Michener, fully James Albert Michener

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

Age | Light | People |

Guru Nanak

Regard all men as equal, since God’s light is contained in the heart of each.

God | Heart | Light | Men | Regard |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Darkness | Existence | Light |

Fritz A. Rothschild

Eternity is another word for unity. In it, past and future are not apart; here is everywhere, and now goes on forever. The opposite of eternity is diffusion not time. Eternity does not begin when time is at its end. Time is eternity broken into space, like a ray of light refracted in the water… unity is a task, not a condition. The world lies in strife, in discord, in divergence. Unity is beyond not within reality.

Eternity | Future | Light | Past | Reality | Space | Time | Unity | World |

Fritz A. Rothschild

The relation of existence to time is characterized by two polar elements: temporality and uninterruptedness. Existence is evanescent and always faces the prospect of annihilation, of being thrown out of the stream of time, yet it also exhibits some degree of permanence as the continuous duration in time. Without an element of constancy there could be no permanence within temporality and no knowledge of reality, since our categories of reason are “mirrors, in which the things are reflected in the light of their constancy… Things perish within time, while time itself is everlasting… The present moment is not a terminal but a signal of beginning, an act of creation.

Beginning | Constancy | Existence | Knowledge | Light | Present | Reality | Reason | Time |

Ethiopian Proverbs

Truth and morning become light with time.

Light | Time | Truth |

Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

The lamps are different, but the Light is the same: it comes from beyond. O thou who art the kernel of Existence, the disagreement between Moslem, Zoroastrian and Jew depends on the standpoint.

Art | Disagreement | Existence | Light | Art |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

A man following Christ’s teaching is like a man carrying a lantern before him at the end of a pole. The light is ever before him, and ever impels him to follow it, by continually lighting up fresh ground and attracting him onward.

Light | Man | Following |

William Wordsworth

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, but he beholds the light, and whence it flows, he sees it in his joy; the youth, who daily farther from the east must travel, still is Nature’s priest, and by the vision splendid is on his way attended; at length the man perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day.

Day | Heaven | Infancy | Joy | Light | Man | Nature | Prison | Vision | Youth |

Robert Alden

There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle.

Darkness | Enough | Light | World |

Bahai’ Prayer NULL

Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be a lamp unto those who walk in darkness, and a home to the stranger. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be a breath of life to the body of humankind, a dew to the soil of the human heart, and a fruit upon the tree of humility.

Adversity | Body | Darkness | Heart | Humility | Judgment | Life | Life | Light | Prosperity | Speech |

John Greenleaf Whittier

We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave of text and legend. Reason’s voice and God’s, Nature’s and Duty’s, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save justice and mercy and humility, a reasonable service of good deeds, pure living, tenderness to human needs, reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see the Master’s footprints in our daily ways? No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, but the calm beauty of an ordered life whose very breathing is unworded praise! A life that stands as all true lives have stood firm-rooted in the faith that God is good.

Beauty | Children | Deeds | Duty | Faith | Father | God | Good | Humility | Justice | Life | Life | Light | Mercy | Nature | Praise | Prayer | Reason | Reverence | Service | Tenderness | Trust | Beauty | God |

Abraham Lincoln

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Light | Right | Wrong |