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

Walter Savage Landor

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel; my fingers ache, my lips are dry:

Doubt | Men | Mind | Pain |

Washington Irving

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

Agony | Grief | Love | Meditation | Present | Sadness | Sorrow |

Washington Irving

The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.

Affliction | Agony | Consolation | Duty | Error | Friend | Grief | Love | Meditation | Mother | Present | Sadness | Sorrow | Child |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Emotions show up in your body as physical manifestations of your thoughts.

Meditation | Silence |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Tapping into the essence of originating Spirit, emulating the attributes of the creative force of intention, and manifesting into your life anything that you desire that's consistent with the universal mind...

God | Meditation | Quiet | Sound | Success | Time | God |

Wayne Muller

The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha—tranquility, peace, and repose—rest, in the deeper possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquility and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete.

Pain | Sadness | Sense | Time |

Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

The practice of non-meditation is ceasing to be the see-er, hearer or speaker while eyes, ears and mouths are fulfilling their function in daily life.

Meditation | Practice |

Wayne Muller

In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?

Betrayal | Pain | Will |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.

Care | Happy | Means | Pain |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

We are Beings, in a school for Gods, learning in slow motion, the consequences of thought.

Pain |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

I believe that if you put fine food into a body with a crummy mind, you get a crummy body, but if you put crummy food into a body with expanded awareness, you get a fine body.

Defense | Experience | Mystery | Pain |

Walker Percy

They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.

Earth | Man | Pain | Woman |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

She wants to go home, but nobodys home. That's why she lies, broken inside. With no place to go, no place to go, to dry her eyes, broken inside...

Children | Fate | Husband | Pain | Reason | Tenderness | Thought | Fate | Thought |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.

Ecstasy | Generosity | Light | Little | Love | Pain |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.

Harmony | Joy | Light | Pain | Play | Trifles | Unique |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.

Generosity | Love | Pain |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it.

Children | Darkness | Fate | Husband | Joy | Pain | Reason | Tenderness | Thought | Fate | Loss | Thought |

Vimala Thakar

The call is not to one of the revolutionary formulas of the past; they have failed—why drag them out again even in new regalia? The challenge now is to create an entirely new, vital revolution that takes the whole of life into its sphere. We have never dared embrace the whole of life in all its awesome beauty; we’ve been content to perpetuate fragments, invent corners where we feel conceptually secure and emotionally safe. We could have our safe little nooks and niches were it not for the terrible mess we have made by attempting to break the cosmic wholeness into bite-size bits. It’s an ugly chaos we have created, and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures.

Action | Duality | Energy | Intelligence | Love | Pain | Pleasure | Sorrow | Wholeness | Will | Afraid |

Vimala Thakar

Self-education begins by watching how we are using the energy and learning how not to waste it through.

Absolute | Action | Care | Day | God | Growth | Life | Life | Meditation | Mind | Need | People | Race | Truth | Tyranny | Will | World | God |

Vimala Thakar

Meditation is meeting eternity in the present moment. It is resolving every problem as it comes. It is resolving every tension as it creeps in. It is facing the challenges of life in a non-fearful way.

Attention | Awareness | Freedom | Meditation | Nature | Will | Awareness | Victim |