Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Divinity

"The meaning of life is experienced when we are in touch with our unique essence, sometimes called the divine spark within... It is both individual and universal. When we are fully aware of this unique inner radiance, we feel what it is to be utterly alive. We experience unconditional love. We sense complete safety because that spark also connects us to the universal divinity within all things." - Barbara Brennan

"There is only one Duty. It is to realize the divinity within... our most sacred life purpose, the most honored ground of existence, and everything else must be made to subserve it." - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte

"If it be the characteristic of a worldly man that he desecrates what is holy, it should be of the Christian to consecrate what is secular, and to recognize a present and presiding Divinity in all things." - Thomas Chalmers

"A person’s soul has a spark of divinity. Forgetting one’s lofty identity, one might pick up major faults and bad habits. Therefore remember at all times that you are a child of the great King and it is not befitting to act in a lowly and degrading manner." - Y. Eibeschuetz

"After all, it is the divinity within that makes the divinity without; and I have been more fascinated by a woman of talent and intelligence, though deficient in personal charms, than I have been by the most regular beauty." - Washington Irving

"There is a divinity within you. No matter what your problem appears to be, the real problem is seldom the problem you see. The real problems is your inability or unwillingness to allow this divinity to unfold its plan through you." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

"Freedom is spiritual. Divinity is the expression of integrity... Mind cannot find fun anywhere but God." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"To live, mankind must recover its essential humanness and its innate divinity; men must recover their capacity for humility, sanity and integrity; soldiers and civilians must see their hope in some other world than one completely dominated by the physical and chemical sciences." - George Stanley, fully George Francis Gillman Stanley

"Religious addiction is using God, the Church, or a belief system as an escape from reality, in an attempt to find or elevate a sense of self-worth or well-being... It is the ultimate form of co-dependency - feeling worthless in and of ourselves and looking outside for something or someone to tell us we are worthwhile... Recovery means discovering divinity in one's own life." - Leo Booth

"We possess a hidden higher self, the spark of divinity within the soul, which reflects this transcendental reality in our lives. By fulfilling certain necessary conditions, such as making ourselves more loving and compassionate, we can clear away the mental and emotional static that separates us from this inner reality, enabling the higher self to assume a central, guiding role in our lives. This awakening - called enlightenment, deliverance, or salvation in the various traditions - is the goal or purpose of human life. When we achieve this complete transformation of consciousness, we awaken from our limited, often painful condition and reconnect with our true nature." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages call inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation , in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed - I have never had any choice... Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity... The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There is a divinity that shapes our ends - but we can help by listening for Its voice." - Kathleen Norris

"In every evil thought there is a spark of divinity, which has sunk to a very low degree, and begs to be elevated." - Joseph Opatoshu

"Divinity hath oftentimes descended upon our slumbers, and the blessed troupes have, in the calm and quiet of the soul, conversed with us." -

"There is no such thing as an average man. Each one of us is a unique individual. Each one of us expresses his humanity and his divinity in some distinctly different way. The beauty and the bloom of each human soul is a thing apart - a separate holy miracle under God, never once repeated throughout all the millenniums of time." - Lane Weston

"The heart opens when we empty ourselves of old programming and return to the open, vulnerable, and authentic being we have always been. This True Self, the spark of divinity within us, is our link to God." - Charles L. Whitfield

"Religion is the divinity within us reaching up to the divinity above." - Bahai Saying NULL

"He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children." - William Blake

"Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven, seated on a throne. Divinity is love... Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love, are - there is the divine." -

"The world is only a partial manifestation of the Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead is infinitely greater than any natural manifestation can be. By his very infinity, by his absolute freedom, he exists beyond all possibility of integral formulation in any scheme of worlds or extension of cosmic Nature, however wide, complex, endlessly varied this and every world may seem to us." - Sri Aurobindo, born Aurobindo Ghose or Ghose

"Our existence seesaws between animality and divinity, between that which is more and that which is less than humanity." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"The essential truth... is that man is under absolute mandate to express divinity in his own life and his whole nature." - F. Ernest Johnson

"Christianity teaches that the human soul is directly related to God. Such immediacy is the hallmark of the Divinity of the soul and the center of our freedom." -

"Divinity finds its image in human and social constructs. The way we think about god ultimately will be the way we think about ourselves and our institutions." - Douglas Meeks, also M. Douglas Meeks

"The human soul, in so far as science can penetrate, is the last chapter of cosmic history as far as it has been written. It is in the soul that Divinity resides." - Michael Pupin, fully Michael Idvosky Pupin

"A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one… defeats the curse which binds us… redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." -

"The greatest thing that we can do is to see the divinity in every face, in every form." - Baird T. Spalding

"If you have anything really valuable to contribute to the world it will come through the expression of your own personality - that single spark of divinity that sets you apart and makes you different from every other living creature." - Bruce Barton

"Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us." - Francis Bacon

"So far as thinking is concerned, surely original thinking is the divinest thing... We check and repress the divinity that stirs within us, to fall down and worship the divinity that is dead without us." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"A man's character is his guardian divinity." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL

"Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are... The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves, it is our very self. Man is manacled only by himself: thought and action are the jailers of Fate - they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom - they liberate, being noble. Not what a man wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns." -

"Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith her right; by these we reach divinity." - John Donne

"When we withdraw from human intercourse into solitude, we are more peculiarly committed in the presence of the divinity; yet some men retire into solitude to devise or perpetrate crimes. This is like a man going to meet and brave a lion in his own gloomy desert, in the very precincts of his dread abode." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster

"‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man." - Joseph Addison

"This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul back on herself, and startles at destruction. ‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man." - Joseph Addison

"There are great depths and obscurities, greater intricacies and perplexities, in an elaborate and well-written piece of nonsense, than in the most abstruse and profound tract of school divinity." - Joseph Addison

"'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 'tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!" - Joseph Addison

"`Tis the divinity that stirs within us; `tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man. Eternity! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!" - Joseph Addison

"The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in such a realization of transcendence, infinity, and abundance, as this of which the upanishadic authors tell. Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then, is cosmological: of representing the universe and whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer is seen standing alerted, the exclamation "Ah!" may be uttered as a recognition of divinity." - Joseph Campbell

"We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that the divinity informs all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is… of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being." - Joseph Campbell

"Remember that Divinity is the true self of Man." - Kahlil Gibran

"It is my humility that gives God his divinity and the proof of it is this. God’s peculiar property is giving. But God cannot give if he has nothing to receive his gifts. Since I make myself receptive to his gifts by my humility so I by my humility do make God giver and since giving is God’s own peculiar property I do by my humility give God his property." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

"Man should remember that God speaks the truth and promises by Himself, the Truth. If God were to be false to His word, His Truth, He would be false to His Divinity, and then He would not be God. It is his promise that our pains shall be changed to joy." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

"The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation... Each of us arrives on this planet with a purpose. To fulfill that purpose is to ignite the spark of divinity in us and give meaning to our lives." - Michael Jackson, fully Michael Joseph Jackson, aka MJ or King of Pop

"There is a divinity within our breast." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL

"Only by the supernatural is a man strong - only by confiding in the divinity which stirs within us. Nothing is so weak as an egotist - nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls." - Ralph Waldo Emerson