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

George Ripley

To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.

Character | Happy | Self | Child |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is then certain that compassion is a natural feeling, which, by moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species.

Character | Compassion | Individual | Love | Self |

Charles A. Reich

To start from self does not mean to be selfish. It means to start from premises based on human life and the rest of nature, rather than premises that are the artificial products of the Corporate State, such as power or status. It is not an ‘ego trip’ but a radical subjectivity designed to find genuine values in a world whose official values are false and distorted. It is not egocentricity, but honesty, wholeness, genuineness in all things. It starts from self because human life is found as individual units, not as corporations and institutions; its intent is to start from life.

Character | Ego | Honesty | Individual | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Power | Rest | Self | Wholeness | World |

Nancy Reagan, born Anne Frances Robbins

Love means giving one’s self to another person fully, not just physically. When two people really love each other, this helps them to stay alive and grow. One must be loved to grow. Love’s such a precious and fragile thing that when it comes we have to hold on tightly. And when it comes, we’re very lucky because for some it never comes at all. If you have love, you’re wealthy in a way that can never be measured.

Character | Giving | Love | Means | People | Self |

Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways.

Body | Character | Earth | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul |

O. Carl Simonton

The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be.

Character | Children | Experience | Health | Land | Love | Men | Self | Wisdom |

Gordon Van Sauter

Never allow your sense of self to become associated with your sense of job. If your job vanishes your self doesn’t.

Character | Self | Sense |

Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

It is the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a good self examiner.

Character | Good | Self | World |

Stanislaw I, born Stanisław Leszczyński, also spelled Stanislaus NULL

It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one's self the seeds of the baseness the other is accused of.

Baseness | Character | Self |

Vaga Saneyi Samhita Upanishad

When to a man who understands, the self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be to him who once beheld that unity?

Character | Man | Self | Sorrow | Unity | Trouble |

Brooke Foss Westcott

No repentance on earth can undo the past.

Character | Earth | Past | Repentance |

Abu Yazid Tayfur ibn 'Isa ibn Surushan al-Bismtami

Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God. Whoever knows God through God becomes alive, and whoever knows God through self becomes dead.

Forgetfulness | God | Self | Wisdom | God |