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

William James

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Genius | Little | Means | Truth | Wisdom |

Ken Kesey

Although the exact number may vary, the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the conscious property of these people. But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!

Awareness | Means | People | Property | Wisdom | Awareness |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Old disease patterns keep replicating themselves when the old thought patterns stay the same. All healing techniques serve to bring about a change in consciousness, which means a new expectancy of wholeness. What you expect at the deepest level is what you get. Your body loves to hear the truth about itself. Your body cannot help but respond to an awareness of and an expectancy of wholeness.

Awareness | Body | Change | Consciousness | Disease | Means | Thought | Truth | Wholeness | Wisdom | Awareness | Old | Thought |

Rockwell Kent

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

Art | Mankind | Means | Understanding | Wisdom |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy.

Love | Means | Wisdom |

Robert Leighton

God hath many sharp-cutting instruments and rough files for the polishing of His jewels; and those He especially loves and means to make the most resplendent, He hath oftenest His tools upon.

God | Means | Wisdom |

Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz

By means of the soul or form there is a true unity which corresponds to what is called the I in us.

Means | Soul | Unity | Wisdom |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Ends | Means | Men | Power | Wisdom |

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton

Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

Means | Right | Society | Wisdom | Society |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Wisdom is alone, but a lonely path does not lead to wisdom. Isolation is death, and wisdom is not found in withdrawal. There is no path to wisdom, for all paths are separative, exclusive. In their very nature, paths can only lead to isolation, though these isolations are called unity, the whole, the one, and so end is as the means. The means is not separate from the goal, the “what should be.” Wisdom comes with the understanding of one’s relationship with the field, with the passer-by, with the fleeting thought. To withdraw, to isolate oneself in order to find, is to put an end to discovery. Relationship leads to an aloneness that is not of isolation. There must be an aloneness, not of the enclosing mind, but of freedom. The complete is the alone, and incompleteness seeks the way of isolation.

Death | Discovery | Freedom | Isolation | Means | Mind | Nature | Order | Relationship | Thought | Understanding | Unity | Wisdom |

Claude Levi-Strauss

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Character | Language | Means | Music | Wisdom |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out... To read means to borrow; to create out of one's readings is paying off one's debts.

Means | Wisdom |

Peter Matthiessen

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at un-extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each even of ordinary life.

Attention | Enlightenment | Life | Life | Meditation | Mindfulness | Nothing | Practice | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Life means progress, and progress means suffering.

Life | Life | Means | Progress | Suffering | Wisdom |

Robert E. Lyon

Modern man seems to be afraid of silence. We are conditioned by radio and television on which every minute must be filled with talking, or some kind of sound. We are stimulated by the American philosophy of keeping on the move all the time - busy, busy, busy. This tends to make us shallow. A person's life can be deepened tremendously by periods of silence, used in the constructive ways of meditation and prayer. Great personalities have spent much time in the silence of life.

Life | Life | Man | Meditation | Philosophy | Prayer | Silence | Sound | Talking | Television | Time | Wisdom | Afraid |

John Locke

He that is master of himself and his own life has a right, too, tot he means of preserving it.

Life | Life | Means | Right | Wisdom |

Guy de Maupassant, fully Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant

To love very much is to love inadequately; we love - that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being.

Body | Life | Life | Love | Means | Soul | Wisdom |