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

Irving Singer

We are by nature thinking beings, and if we cannot escape anxiety about the inherent structure of our thought processes, how can we hope to creative purposive ideals that are congruent with reality instead of deflecting us from it?

Anxiety | Anxiety | Hope | Ideals | Nature | Reality | Thinking | Thought | Thought |

Adam Smith

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

Defense | Government | Property | Reality | Security |

Alan Cohen

The reality of thoughts and the power they have to create and to change the world brings with it a supremely important realization: We can bless and we can heal.

Change | Important | Power | Reality | World |

Aharon Appelfeld

Can art be completely invented? It’s a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination.

Art | Imagination | Reality | Art |

Alfred North Whitehead

Truth is a qualification which applies to appearance alone. Reality is just itself, and it is nonsense to ask whether it be true or false. Truth is the conformation of appearance to reality.

Appearance | Nonsense | Reality | Truth |

Alfred North Whitehead

A structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process.

Reality |

Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell

What the psychoanalysts stress, the relation between dreams and our conscious acts, is what poets already know. The poets walk this bridge with ease, from conscious to unconscious, physical reality to psychological reality.

Dreams | Reality |

Alexis Carrel

The search for God is, indeed, an entirely personal undertaking. By the exercise of the normal activities of his consciousness, man may endeavor to reach an invisible reality both immanent in and transcending the material world. thus, he throws himself into the most audacious adventure that one can dare.

Adventure | Consciousness | God | Man | Reality | Search | World | God |

Alexis Carrel

In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation.

Beauty | Body | Civilization | Error | Existence | Important | Man | Mind | Organic | Pleasure | Reality | Science | Sorrow | Soul | Thought | Thought |

Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Imagination | Knowledge |

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.

Order | People | Reality | Afraid |

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

You are but a bridge, a passage, and your life’s reality lies in that which you transform. The tree transforms the earth into branches; the bee, the flower into honey; and your tillage, the black earth into a blaze of wheat.

Earth | Life | Life | Reality |

Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Religion is Man’s attempt to get into touch with an absolute spiritual Reality behind the phenomena of the Universe, and, having made contact with It, to live in harmony with It.

Absolute | Harmony | Man | Phenomena | Reality | Religion | Universe |