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 Ellery Channing

Contempt of all outward things that come in competition with duty fulfills the ideal of human greatness. It is sanctioned by conscience, that universal and eternal lawgiver, whose chief principle is, that everything must be yielded up for right.

Character | Competition | Conscience | Contempt | Duty | Eternal | Greatness | Right |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Immortality is participation in the eternal now of the divine Ground: survival is persistence in one of the forms of time. Immortality is the result of total deliverance.

Character | Eternal | Immortality | Persistence | Survival | Time |

Anna Jameson

The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.

Character | Competition | Man | Wise |

Andrew Carnegie

While the law (of competition) may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.

Competition | Individual | Law | Race | Survival | Wisdom |

Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn

I regard it as the foremost task of education to insure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and, above all, compassion.

Compassion | Curiosity | Education | Qualities | Regard | Self | Self-denial | Spirit | Survival | Tenacity | Wisdom |

William Ralph Inge

Overpopulation... has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit.

Survival | Wisdom |

Walter Savage Landor

Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.

Commerce | Competition | Religion | Wisdom |

J. Z. Knight, fully Judy Zebra Knight, born Judity Darlene Hampton

Mere survival has always been the surface, bottom-line surface for our existence... Survival alone does not ennoble us... True meaning... can be found in what we’ve yet to accomplish, in the realm of the unknown. We must resolve to look deep within, at the unrealized potential of our unevolved selves. Materially, the unknown is one vast nothingness; potentially, it is all things. The unknown within us is where all dreams, thoughts and genius are frozen. The act of searching to make known the unknown triggers the brain. It allows us to incorporate, in ourselves, a greater consciousness, lighting the way for our dreams to enact themselves. Although we seem small in comparison with the whole universe, we are equipped with the greatest cosmic hookup ever created: the human brain. The brain - linked unconsciously to the infinite mind where the unknown resides - only facilitates thoughts, it does not create it. In struggling to find the answer to why we exist, we awaken the infinite mind to the unknown, making known the unknown, bringing meaning to our existence and commonness to all.

Consciousness | Dreams | Existence | Genius | Meaning | Mind | Survival | Universe | Wisdom |

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, aka "Pat"

Liberty and Equality are the twin ideals of American democracy. But they are not the same thing... Many person who would gladly die for liberty are appalled by equality. Many who are devoted to equality are puzzled and even troubled by liberty. Much of the political history of the American nation can be seen as a competition between these two ideals.

Competition | Democracy | Equality | History | Ideals | Liberty | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.

Ambition | Benevolence | Competition | Desire | Inequality | Jealousy | Men | Property | Rivalry | Security | Wisdom |

Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson

The white man’s civilization with its inhuman economic competition and rugged individualism has produced millions of physical and mental wrecks. It has produced enough vices to fill Dante’s hell. Nine-tenths of the people who reach forty are suffering from shattered nerves.

Civilization | Competition | Enough | Hell | Man | People | Suffering | Wisdom |

Roger N. Walsh

Eventually we'll have to confront the fact that world suffering is the result of ill-conceived thoughts taking form through misdirected action. If we're going to survive as a species, we must relinquish - to unprecedented levels, - qualities such as greed, hatred, and delusion. In other words, our very survival depends on accelerated levels of psychological and spiritual maturation.

Action | Delusion | Greed | Qualities | Suffering | Survival | Wisdom | Words | World |

Jonathan Weiner

We talk about a space race. There is a space race down here on the ground. In this race every human being is superpower and the competition no longer stands a chance. Other species are bound to this or that patch of turf, and this planet. We feel bound to no patch of turn on Earth, bound only for the stars. We sacrifice a marsh, a bay, a park, a lake. We sacrifice a sparrow. We trade one countdown for another.

Chance | Competition | Earth | Race | Sacrifice | Space | Wisdom |

Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney

Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth.

Art | Earth | Evolution | Individual | Love | Man | Means | Survival | Unique | Woman | Art |

Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.

Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |

Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America NULL

The principle of competition appears to be nothing more than a partially conventionalized embodiment of primeval selfishness... the supremacy of the motive of self-interest... The Christian conscience can be satisfied with nothing less than the complete substitution of motives of mutual helpfulness and goodwill for the motive of private gain.

Competition | Conscience | Helpfulness | Motives | Nothing | Self | Self-interest | Selfishness |