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

Anna Lorette Rose Hawkes

Our past is our heritage, our present is our responsibility, and our future is our destiny.

Destiny | Future | Past | Present | Responsibility | Wisdom |

Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald

A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future.

Future | History | Past | Wisdom |

Ta-chu Hui-Hai

When you stop thinking that things have a past or future, and that they come or go, then in the whole universe there won't be a single atom that is not your own treasure. All you have to do is look into your own mind; then the marvelous reality will manifest itself at all times. Don't search for the truth with your intellect. Don't search at all. The nature of the mind is intrinsically pure.

Future | Mind | Nature | Past | Reality | Search | Thinking | Truth | Universe | Will | Wisdom |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

We are not only made in God’s image, but that we are made to image God - to reflect His freedom, joy, compassion and peace in our lives... When religion becomes reduced to an outward observation of rules and ceremonies and an intolerance toward the beliefs of others, we are mistaking the oyster for the pearl. The oyster is certainly valuable, but it is of infinitely greater value when it promotes the growth of the pearl... We cannot reason our way back to the roots of religion. We cannot trap God in stale dogmas or narrow creeds. Our purpose is to make religion a continuous living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead but of the living who are dead to their own truth. Then religion becomes a thread that can both link us to the past and guide us to our future.

Compassion | Experience | Freedom | Future | God | Growth | Intolerance | Joy | Observation | Past | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Religion | Truth | Wisdom | God | Value |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

No time exists other than now... So now is all you have and all you ever will have... Why not begin doing the best you can right where you are?... Trust the process of growth. Trust God. Pay attention to the details of your life, doing your very best with each challenge that presents itself... The past is the raw material of the present, but the past is not a blueprint for the present... Begin where you are. Do what you can. Even a small effort to change, to grow, to improve, will bring astonishing results... You can choose to build on what you were, but you are not what you were. You can focus on what you will be, but you are not what you will be. What you are is what you are right now - the inheritor of all of God’s gifts.

Attention | Challenge | Change | Effort | Focus | God | Growth | Life | Life | Past | Present | Right | Time | Trust | Will | Wisdom |

Robert Full

Act with a determination not to be turned aside by thoughts of the past and fears of the future.

Determination | Future | Past | Wisdom |

Walter Savage Landor

The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.

Music | Nothing | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Charles Lamb

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of bells (bells the music highest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve-month. All I have done or suffered, performed or neglected - in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight of a contemporary, when he exclaimed: “I saw the skirts of the departing year.” It is no more than what is sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking.

Heaven | Indifference | Mind | Music | Past | Sadness | Sound | Time | Wisdom | Worth | Old |

John Locke

Repentance is a hearty sorrow for our past misdeeds, and is a sincere resolution and endeavor, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. It does not consist in one single act of sorrow, but in doing works meet for repentance; in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ for the remainder of our lives.

God | Law | Obedience | Past | Power | Repentance | Resolution | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.

Man | Obedience | Past | Time | Wisdom |

Stephen Mitchell

When does God create heaven and earth? In the beginning. And when is the beginning? At every moment. Dying to past and future, we are born into the creative Now. Beginner's mind is the mind of God.

Beginning | Earth | Future | God | Heaven | Mind | Past | Wisdom | God |

Henry Fairfield Osborn

We do not live to extenuate the miseries of the past nor to accept as incurable those of the present.

Past | Present | Wisdom |

Padmasamabhava, "The Lotus-Born", aka Guru Rinpoche "Precious Guru" or Lopon Rinpoche or Padum in Tibet NULL

If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.

Future | Life | Life | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

God is withdrawn from both ends of time, for his life is not Time, but Eternity, the archetype of time. And in Eternity there is no past and future, only present.

Ends | Eternity | Future | God | Life | Life | Past | Present | Time | Wisdom |

Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

I do not evolve, I am. In art there is neither past nor future. Art that is not in the present will never be.

Art | Future | Past | Present | Will | Wisdom | Art |