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

Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

Belief | Man |

Henry James

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Belief | Life | Life | Will | Worth | Afraid |

Henri Frédéric Amiel

A belief is not true because it is useful.

Belief |

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

Religion is not based on belief or faith: religion is based on awe, religion is based on wonder. Religion is based on the mysterious that is your surround. To feel it, to be aware of it, to see it, open your eyes and drop the dust of the ages. Clean your mirror! and see what beauty surrounds you, what tremendous grandeur goes on knocking at your doors. Why are you sitting with closed eyes? Why are you sitting with such long faces? Why can't you dance? and why can't you laugh?

Beauty | Belief | Religion | Beauty |

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

Yoga is existential, experiential, experimental. No belief is required, no faith is needed – only courage to experience. And that’s what’s lacking. You can believe easily because in belief you are not going to be transformed. Belief is something added to you, something superficial. Your being is not changed; you are not passing through some mutation.

Belief | Courage | Faith |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The desire for security is not only economic, but much more profound and complex. If man destroys the family, he will find other forms of security through the State, through the collective, through belief and soon, which will in turn breed their own problems. We must understand the desire for inward, psychological security and not merely replace one pattern of security with another.

Belief | Desire | Man | Security | Will | Understand |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.

Belief | Nothing | Science | Trust |

Joris-Karl "J.K." Huysmans, pseudonym for Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans

The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit.

Battle | Belief | Ends | Faith | Giving | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Satan | Struggle | Winning |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real.

Belief | God | Reality | Will | God |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.

Assertion | Belief |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.

Belief | God | God |

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

Real freedom happens only when your life becomes so total in each moment that there is no need to decide; that totality decides. Do you follow me? -- the totality itself decides. You are not facing two alternatives: whether to marry this woman or that. Your heart is totally with one. There is no motive so you are not divided, and there is no confusion. If you decide out of confusion you will create conflict. Confusion will take you into deeper confusions. Never decide out of confusion.

Freedom | Heart | Life | Life | Need | Will | Woman |

James Truslow Adams

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life IS worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Belief | Life | Life | Will | Worth | Afraid |

James Allen

Whether you be man or woman you will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

Man | Mind | Will | Woman | World |

James Truslow Adams

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Ability | Better | Birth | Circumstances | Land | Life | Life | Man | Opportunity | Order | Woman |

Jean de La Bruyère

A man can keep another's secret better than his own. A woman her own better than others.

Better | Man | Woman |

Jeremy Rifkin

The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.

Age | Energy | Life | Life | Man | Woman |

Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in god - a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge - adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.

Belief | Experience | God | Knowledge | Man | Will | God |

Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God—a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge—adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.

Belief | Experience | God | Man | Will | God |