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 Langland

When all treasures are tried… truth is the fairest.

Truth |

Akira Kurosawa

The truth is in the mystery.

Mystery | Truth |

Kafū Nagai, pen name for Nagai Sōkichi

Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society.

Empathy | Life | Life | Society | Truth |

Mishnah or The Mishnah NULL

By three things is the world preserved: by truth, by judgment, and by peace… The three are really one; if judgment is executed, truth is vindicated and peace results.

Judgment | Peace | Truth | World |

John Masefield

Man with his burning soul has but an hour of breath to build a ship of Truth in which his soul may sail, sail on the sea of death; for death takes toll of beauty, courage, youth, of all but Truth.

Beauty | Courage | Death | Man | Soul | Truth | Youth |

Joost Meerloo. fully Joost Abraham Maurits Meerlo

In Totalitaria, jails and concentration camps by the score are built in order to provoke fear and awe among the population… In these centers of fear, nobody is really corrected; he is, as it were, expelled from humanity, wasted, killed – but too quickly, lest the terrorizing influence be diminished. The truth of the matter is that these jails are built not for real criminals, but rather for their terrorizing effect on the bystanders, the citizens of Totalitaria.

Awe | Fear | Humanity | Influence | Order | Truth |

George S. Merriam

The key of the world is given into our hands when we throw ourselves unreservedly into the service of the highest truth we know.

Service | Truth | World |

Thomas Merton

Truth, not in distinct and clear-cut definitions but in the limpid obscurity of a single intuition that unites all dogmas in one simple Light, shining into the soul directly from God’s eternity, without the medium of created concept, without the intervention of symbols or of language or the likeness of material things. Here the Truth is One Whom we not only know and possess but by Whom we are known and possessed. Here theology ceases to be a body of abstractions and becomes a Living Reality Who is God Himself.

Body | Eternity | God | Intuition | Language | Light | Obscurity | Obscurity | Reality | Soul | Theology | Truth | God |

Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

There is no other way of guarding one’s self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect. A prudent prince must therefore take a third course, by choosing for his council wise men, and giving these alone full liberty to speak the truth to him, but only of those things that he asks and of nothing else; but he must ask them about everything and hear their opinion, and afterwards deliberate by himself in his own way.

Flattery | Giving | Liberty | Men | Nothing | Opinion | Respect | Self | Truth | Will | Wise | Understand |

Ba Maw, fully Bamaw Sayadaw U Kumara Bhivamsa

Every truth in this round world has its opposite somewhere.

Truth | World |

Harold F. Mazumdar

Religion, according to the Hindu, is not compounded of dogmas and creeds. Religion is a way of life in consonance with rationality and Truth. Truth is not and cannot be revealed once and for all - it must ever be a progressive revelation.

Life | Life | Rationality | Religion | Revelation | Truth |

Thomas Merton

My only task is to be what I am, a man seeking God in silence and solitude, with respect for the demands and realities of his own vocation, and fully aware that others too are seeking the truth in their own way.

God | Man | Respect | Silence | Solitude | Truth | Respect | God |

Max Otto, fully Max Carl Otto

The standard device for getting around a logical contradiction by elevating it to the status of a truth beyond logic.

Contradiction | Logic | Truth |

Guru Nanak

There is one God, eternal truth is his name, Creator of all things, and the all-pervading spirit. Fearless and without hatred, timeless and formless. Beyond birth and death, self-enlightened.

Birth | Death | Eternal | God | Self | Spirit | Truth |

Thomas Paine

When opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.

Government | Religion | Truth | Will | Government |

Nikhilananda, fully Swami Nikhilananda, born Dinesh Chandra Das Gupta NULL

A spiritual truth is valid only when it does not contradict universal reason, one’s inner experience, and the experience of other seers of truth.

Experience | Reason | Truth |

Charles Pierre Péguy

The life of an honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion... For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.

Apostasy | Life | Life | Man | Truth | Wishes |