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

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

A man's true greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded on a just estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent self-examinations, and a steady obedience to the rule which he knows to be right, without troubling himself about what others may think or say, or whether they do or do not that which he thinks and says and does.

Character | Consciousness | Greatness | Life | Life | Man | Obedience | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Rule | Self | Think |

Richard Maurice Bucke, often called Maurice Bucke

When a person who was self conscious only, enters into cosmic consciousness - he knows without learning certain things... that the universe is not a dead machine but a living presence... that in its essence and tendency it is infinitely good... that individual existence is continuous beyond what is called death.

Character | Consciousness | Death | Existence | Good | Individual | Learning | Self | Universe |

Satipatthana Sutra NULL

Satipatthana Sutta - The Foundation of Mindfulness Translated from Pali: A monk lives contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome, in this world, covetousness, and grief; he lives contemplating feelings in feelings, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome, in this world, covetousness and grief; he lives contemplating consciousness in consciousness, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome, in this world, covetousness and grief; he lives contemplating mental objects in mental objects, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome, in this world, covetousness and grief.

Body | Character | Consciousness | Feelings | Grief | Mindfulness | World |

J. G. Fichte, fully Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge... It is intended to express that Act which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather is at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible.

Character | Consciousness | Knowledge | Wisdom |

Gustave Geley

We maintain... that the individual consciousness is an integral part of that which is essential and permanent in the living being, that it pre-exists and survives all successive organizations.

Character | Consciousness | Individual |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

A return from the over-estimation of the property of consciousness is the indispensable preliminary to any genuine insight into the course of psychic events... The unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious can stop at this stage, and yet claim to be considered a full psychic function.

Character | Consciousness | Estimation | Events | Indispensable | Insight | Life | Life | Property |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our sense-organs.

Character | Consciousness | Nature | Reality | Sense | World |

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, born Margaret Power

One of the almost numberless advantages of goodness is, that it blinds its possessor to many of those faults in others which could not fail to be detected by the morally defective. A consciousness of unworthiness renders people extremely quick-sighted in discerning the vices of their neighbors; as person scan easily discover in others the symptoms of those diseases beneath which they themselves have suffered.

Character | Consciousness | People |

Samuel Griswold Goodrich, better known by pseudonymn Peter Parley

Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue and renders a man, in the pursuit or defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition in contempt.

Character | Consciousness | Contempt | Courage | Defense | Fear | Man | Opposition | Right | Virtue | Virtue |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.

Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

A dimension is missing from ourselves and our culture which is reflected in our inability to reconcile the competing demands of our inner and outer lives. As a result, most of us make use of a very small portion of our possible consciousness and of our soul’s resources... The destiny of mankind depends on something as personal and intimate as the way each one of us chooses to live, think and behave.

Character | Consciousness | Culture | Destiny | Mankind | Soul | Think |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

If there is freedom... there is a spiritual Reality, which it is the final end and purpose of consciousness to know; then all life is in the nature of an intelligence test, and the higher the level of awareness and the greater the potentialities of the creature, the more searchingly difficult will be the questions asked.

Awareness | Character | Consciousness | Freedom | Intelligence | Life | Life | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Will | Awareness |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Many people are willing to rearrange the outer things in their lives, but few are willing to rearrange the priorities of their inner worlds. If your consciousness doesn’t change, you will continually re-create the same old circumstances.

Change | Character | Circumstances | Consciousness | People | Will | Old |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The relationship between moral action and spiritual knowledge is circular, as it were, and reciprocal. Selfless behavior makes possible an accession of knowledge, and the accession of knowledge makes possible the performance of further and more genuinely selfless actions, which in their turn enhance the agent’s capacity for knowing... A man undertakes right action (which includes, of course, right consciousness and right meditation), and this enables him to catch a glimpse of the Self that underlies his separate individuality. Having seen his own self as the Self, he becomes selfless (and therefore acts selflessly) and in virtue of selflessness he is to be conceived as unconditioned.

Action | Behavior | Capacity | Character | Consciousness | Individuality | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Meditation | Relationship | Right | Self | Virtue | Virtue |

William James

The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on.

Attention | Character | Consciousness | Mind | Rest | Suppression |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Character | Consciousness | Pain |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

The psyche is not of today. Its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial root beneath the earth.

Ancestry | Character | Consciousness | Earth | Individual | Wisdom |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

All relationship is based on the image that you have built around another and the other has built about you... What is relationship? If the image has come to an end, which is the content of consciousness that makes up your consciousness, when the various images you have about yourself, about everything, come to an end, then what is the relationship between you and her? Then is there an observer observing apart from the thing it has observed? Or is it a total movement of love in relationship? Are you getting it? So love is a movement in relationship in which the observer is not.

Character | Consciousness | Love | Relationship |

Holger Kalweit

Our culture needs a great deal more than a changed lifestyle. In the Western mind, thought-structures and the relationship between consciousness and matter are badly out of balance, so that our world has become wholly pervaded by a materialism that is threatening to squash us to death. We are in a state of materialistic hypertrophy, and our eventual self-destruction would in fact be no more than the logical consequence of our attitudes.

Balance | Character | Consciousness | Culture | Death | Materialism | Mind | Relationship | Self | Thought | World |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

There is an aliveness in people who are living life and not merely observing or intellectualizing it... During the time of catastrophic change, each individual has the opportunity to feel fully alive and resource-filled-awake far beyond the daily soporific states of consciousness in which most of us reside. Living on an edge heightens the human awareness. It does not dull it.

Aliveness | Awareness | Change | Character | Consciousness | Individual | Life | Life | Opportunity | People | Time |