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

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

Any judgment we make, no matter of whom, registers in the heart as a disruption of relationship, and the heart dutifully responds on behalf of our defense, shifting neural, hormonal, and electromagnetic systems from relational to defensive. Creator and created are giving rise to each other, we are judged as we have judged.

Defense | Giving | Heart | Judgment | Relationship |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

All systems are dynamics, intricately interdependent and interactive. Environment and genetics are a paired dynamic.

Dynamic | Interdependent |

Martin Heidegger

We should accept the suitability of partial views for partial contexts... Too often the attempt to devise moral theories and systems that can encompass all problems leads to so much vagueness, unclarity, grandiosity, and indeterminacy in applying them that these theories and systems are actually applied to almost nothing.

Nothing | Problems | Theories |

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

Science could not survive without a community sharing scientific values. Moral systems do not continue unless individuals subscribe to a common set of ethics. Values are so ephemeral that they require the joining psychic input of a group to retain their hold on each person’s attention. They may be created by individuals, but they must be maintained by the collectivity.

Attention | Ethics | Science |

Roger Babson, fully Roger Ward Babson

A character standard is far more important than even a gold standard. The success of all economic systems is still dependent upon both righteous leaders and righteous people. In the last analysis, our national future depends upon our national character - that is, whether it is spiritually or materially minded.

Character | Future | Gold | Important | People | Success |

Thich Nhất Hanh

Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth. Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.

Absolute | Doctrine | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Order | Practice | Present | Reality | Receive | Thought | Truth | World | Learn | Think | Thought |

Thomas Carlyle

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

Kill |

Elizabeth Klarer

A simple equation gives us the answer to the unified field propulsion systems for interstellar spaceships. A unified field equation of seven-figure harmonics is the key to space travel.

Space |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue. Both systems are developing into managerial societies, their inhabitants well fed, well clad, having their wishes satisfied, and not having wishes that cannot be satisfied. Men are increasingly automatons, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines; there reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it.

Alienation | Capitalism | Intelligence | Machines | Man | Men | Power | Reason | Will | Wisdom | Wishes |

Ervin László

Information is entirely basic in the universe. In the latest conception the universe doesn't consist of matter and space; it consists of energy and information. Energy exists in the form of wave-patterns and wave-propagations in the quantum vacuum that fills space; in its various forms, energy is the "hardware" of the universe. The "software" is information. The universe is not an assemblage of bits of inert matter moving passively in empty space: it's a dynamic and coherent whole. The energy that constitutes its hardware is always and everywhere "in-formed." It's in-formed by what David Bohm called the implicate order and physicists now regard as the quantum vacuum or zero-point field (also called physical spacetime, universal field, or nuether). This is the "in-formation" that structures the physical world, the information we grasp as the laws of nature. Without information the energy-waves and patterns of the universe would be as random and unstructured as the behavior of a computer without its software. But the universe is not random and unstructured; it's precisely "in-formed." Would it be any the less precisely informed, complex systems could not have emerged in it, and we would not be here to ask how this on first sight highly improbable development could have come about.

Behavior | Computer | Dynamic | Energy | Order | Regard | Universe |

Gary Zukav

We are evolving from five-sensory humans into multisensory humans... The perceptions of the multi-sensory human extend beyond physical reality to the larger dynamical systems of which our physical reality is a part.

Reality |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

Ability | Nothing |

Glenn Clark

There are only two great economic systems in operation in the world today. If Capitalism in the spirit of Christian love can solve the problem of distribution and bring unemployment to an end, it will find itself spreading and recapturing the nations it has lost to its rival. But if Capitalism is permeated with selfishness it will gradually give way to Communism, Technocracy or some other form of Socialism.

Capitalism | Love | Nations | Selfishness | Spirit | Will | World |

Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith

The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies.

World | Crisis |

Jacques Monod

The scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.

Evolution | Harmony | Intention | Man | Universe |

Jacques Monod

There are living systems; there is no living 'matter.' No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell. .

Present |

Jean Piaget

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

Means | Reality |

Jules Henry

School is an institution for drilling children in cultural orientation. ...American classrooms, like educational institutions anywhere, express the values, preoccupations,and fears found in the culture as a whole. School has no choice; it must train the children to fit the culture as it is. ...Since education is always against some things and for others, it bears the burden of the cultural obessions. ...It thus comes about that most educational systems are imbued with anxiety and hostility, that they are against as many things as they are for. ... The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them...acquiescence, not originality. ...Schools are the central conserving force of the culture.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Children | Culture | Education | Force | Mind | Spirit |

Kenichi Ohmae

It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them.

Old |