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

Karl Marx

Though man is a unique individual, he is equally the whole, the ideal whole, the subjective existence of society as thought and experienced. He exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence, and as the sum of human manifestations of life.

Existence | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Reality | Society | Thought | Unique | Society | Thought |

Karl Barth

History is the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others, of the struggle for existence hypocritically described by ideologists as the struggle for justice and freedom, of the ebb and flow of old and new forms of human righteousness, each vying with the rest in the solemnity and triviality... Yet one drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things.

Display | Eternity | Existence | Freedom | History | Intelligence | Justice | Men | Power | Rest | Righteousness | Struggle | Old |

Kahlil Gibran

How ignorant are those who see, without question, the abstract existence of some of their senses, but insist upon doubting until that existence reveals itself to all their senses. Is not faith the sense of the heart as truly as sight is the sense of the eye?... How strange is the one who dreams in truth of a beautiful reality, and then, when he endeavours to fashion it into form but cannot succeed, doubts the dream and blasphemes the reality and distrusts the beauty!

Abstract | Beauty | Dreams | Existence | Faith | Heart | Question | Reality | Sense | Truth |

Manly P. Hall, fully Manly Palmer Hall

It is conceivable that even in the physical world there is much more than we can see, and that there are many regions of existence for which we have no perceptive capabilities.

Existence | World |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

The existence of virtue depends entirely upon its use.

Existence | Virtue | Virtue |

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma

Physics has discovered the edge of infinity; the wisdom of the ages takes us across the border, which is nowhere but in us. When each person rejoins the stream of evolution that upholds the galaxies ands sweeps life forward on the wave of eternity, human existence will cease to contain any suffering, and our real purpose in living - to create heaven on earth - will be realized.

Earth | Eternity | Evolution | Existence | Heaven | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Suffering | Will | Wisdom |

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

The thoughts we think of and the things we make are under our control, that we can manipulate them at will. The evidence seems to suggest the contrary. The information we generate has a life of its own, and its existence is sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, relative to ours.... It doesn’t seem that memes are any more dependent on their environment than we are.

Control | Evidence | Existence | Life | Life | Will | Think |

Martha Graham

Dance is the most beautiful metaphor of existence in the world.

Existence | World |

Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler

What is needed to make democracy work as it is not now working- to bring into existence in reality a sound conception of democracy? The mass liberal education of the mass electorate. Not just schooling, but an education that involves moral training as well as training of the mind.

Democracy | Education | Existence | Mind | Reality | Sound | Training | Work |

Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Existence | War |

Napoleon Hill

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It's the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

Existence | Man | Mind | Struggle |

Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

Aesthetics | Change | Ethics | Existence | Life | Life | Progress |

Oliver Goldsmith

Nothing can exceed the vanity of our existence but the folly of our pursuits.

Existence | Folly | Nothing |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Existence | Man | Object | Question |

Norman Vincent Peale

Consider! Behind you lie the confusions and inadequacies of that remarkably over-rated period of human existence known as youth. Youth has vitality, its true; youth has a superabundance of “free energy.” But it has little else. It lacks poise. It lacks experience. Above all, it has neither judgment nor wisdom, the two qualities which make life supremely worth while... the rewards of self-knowledge are enormous... self-knowledge is the key to self-mastery... Calm, assured, integrated people have a way of making considerable impact on reality. By changing themselves, they change the world around them.

Change | Energy | Existence | Experience | Judgment | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | People | Qualities | Reality | Self | Self-knowledge | Self-mastery | Wisdom | World | Worth | Youth | Youth |

Norman Vincent Peale

One of my lifelong convictions is that death, far from being the end, is but the door to an existence larger and more glorious than any human conception.

Convictions | Death | Existence |

Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.

Existence | Meaning | Means | Question | Receive |

Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

At death, you forget all the limitations of the physical body, and realize how free you are... You exist apart from the mortal body... There is nothing to fear. When death comes, laugh at it. Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die. Our real self, the soul, is immortal. We may sleep for a little while in that change called death, but we can never be destroyed. We exist, and that existence is eternal... Nothing can terminate the eternal consciousness.

Body | Change | Consciousness | Death | Eternal | Existence | Experience | Fear | Lesson | Little | Mortal | Nothing | Self | Soul | Learn |

P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

Everything we know, everything we recognise as existing lies in the line of the fourth dimension, the line of the fourth dimension is the historical “time” of our section of existence. This is the only “time” we know, the only time we feel, the only time we recognise. But though we are not aware of it, sensations of the existence of other “times”, both parallel and perpendicular, continually enter into our consciousness. These parallel lines are completely analogous to our time, and consists of before - now - after, whereas the perpendicular “times” consist only of now, and are, as it were, crossthreads, the woof in a fabric, in their relation to the parallel lines of time which in this case represent the warp.

Consciousness | Existence | Time |

Persian Proverbs

The legs of those who require proofs of God’s existence are made of wood.

Existence | God |