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

Elbert Green Hubbard

All success consists in this: you are doing something for somebody - benefiting humanity - and the feeling of success comes from the consciousness of this.

Consciousness | Humanity | Success |

Eric Hoffer

A feeling of utter worthlessness levels a man's attitude toward his fellow beings. He views the whole of humanity as being of one kind. He will despise equally those who love him and those who hate him, those who are noble and those who are mean, those who are compassionate and those who are cruel. It is as if the feeling of worthlessness cuts one off from the rest of mankind. One sees humanity as a foreign species.

Despise | Hate | Humanity | Love | Man | Mankind | Rest | Will |

Eric Hoffer

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

Humanity | Love |

Felix Adler

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

Civilization | Humanity | Nations | Society | Society |

Francis Bacon

Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.

Divinity | Humanity |

George F. Kennan

If humanity is to have a hopeful future, there is no escape from the preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty.

Future | Humanity | Loneliness | Responsibility | Soul |

Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner

For every civilization or every period of history it is true today: show me what kind of god you have and I will tell you what kind of humanity you possess.

Civilization | God | History | Humanity | Will | God |

Herbert Spencer

Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction… If the subjects be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance.

Capacity | Children | Humanity | Little | Order | Right | Self | Will |

Herbert Spencer

Each child’s mind [should go] through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through. The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learned them.

Humanity | Mind | Position | Present | Race | Relationship | Child | Learn | Truths |

Immanuel Kant

That in the order of ends, man (and with him every rational being) is an end in himself, that is, that he can never be used merely as a means by any (not even by God) without being at the same time an end also himself, that therefore humanity in our person must be holy to ourselves, this follows now of itself because he is the subject of the moral law, in other words, of that which is holy in itself, and on account of which and in agreement with which alone can anything be termed holy. For this moral law is founded on the autonomy of his will, as a free will which by its universal laws must necessarily be able to agree with that to which it is to submit itself.

Ends | Free will | God | Humanity | Law | Man | Means | Moral law | Order | Time | Will | Words |

Immanuel Kant

There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable.

Crime | Death | Equality | Humanity | Life | Life | Murder | Retaliation | Suffering | Murder |

John Fiske

Every temptation that is resisted, every noble aspiration that is encouraged, every sinful thought that is repressed, every bitter word that is withheld,, adds its little item to the impetus of that great movement which is bearing humanity onward toward a richer life and higher character.

Aspiration | Character | Humanity | Life | Life | Little | Temptation | Thought | Aspiration | Temptation | Thought |

John Ruskin

All real joy and power of progress... depend on finding something to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain.

Baseness | Disdain | Habit | Humanity | Joy | Power | Progress | Reverence |

John Stuart Mill

All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.

Good | Humanity | Obedience |

John Ruskin

All real joy and power of progress in humanity depend on finding something to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain.

Baseness | Disdain | Habit | Humanity | Joy | Power | Progress | Reverence |

Kahlil Gibran

Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature do not alter its course.

Freedom | Humanity | Love | Nature | Phenomena | Spirit | World |

Lewis Mumford

Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.

Humanity | Nature |

Kahlil Gibran

The will of humanity cannot change the will of God.

Change | God | Humanity | Will |

Kahlil Gibran

They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.

Duty | Freedom | Humanity | Oppression | Slavery | Society | Spirit | Truth | Society |

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

Harmony is usually achieved by evolutionary changes involving an increase in an organism’s complexity, that is, an increase in both differentiation and integration. (Differentiation refers to the degree to which a system (i.e., an organ such as the brain, or an individual, a family, a corporation, a culture, or humanity as a whole) is composed of parts that differ in structure or function from one another. Integration refers to the extent to which the parts communicate and enhance one another’s goals. A system that is more differentiated and integrated than another is said to be more complex.)

Culture | Family | Goals | Harmony | Humanity | Individual | Integration | System |