Great Throughts Treasury

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

Obedience

"The deepest need of men is not food and clothing and shelter, important as they are. It is God. We have mistaken the nature of poverty, and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God's recreating, loving peace. Peer into poverty and see if we are really getting down to the deepest needs, in our economic salvation schemes. These are important. But they lie farther along the road, secondary steps toward world reconstruction. The primary step is a holy life, transformed and radiant in the glory of God." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"The last fruit of holy obedience is the simplicity of the trusting child, the simplicity of the children of God. It is the simplicity which lies beyond complexity. It is the naiveté which is the yonder side of sophistication. It is the beginning of spiritual maturity, which comes after the awkward age of religious busy-ness for the Kingdom of God—yet how many are caught, and arrested in development, within this adolescent development of the soul's growth! The mark of this simplified life is radiant joy. It lives in the Fellowship of the Transfigured Face. Knowing sorrow to the depths it does not agonize and fret and strain, but in serene, unhurried calm it walks in time with the joy and assurance of Eternity. Knowing fully the complexity of men's problems it cuts through to the Love of God and ever cleaves to Him. Like the mercy of Shakespeare, "'tis mightiest in the mightiest." But it binds all obedient souls together in the fellowship of humility and simple adoration of Him who is all in all." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"There is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions - God experienced is a vast surprise." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly

"Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved." - Thucydides NULL

"God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue." - William Law

"The one supreme, unchangeable rule of love, which is a law to all intelligent beings of all worlds and will be a law to all eternity, is this, viz., that God alone is to be loved for Himself, and all other beings only in Him and for Him. Whatever intelligent creature lives not under this rule of love is so far fallen from the order of his creation, and is, till he returns to this eternal law of love, an apostate from God and incapable of the kingdom of Heaven. Now, if God is alone to be loved for Himself, then no creature is to be loved for itself; and so all self-love in every creature is absolutely condemned. And if all created beings are only to be loved in and for God, then my neighbor is to be loved as I love myself, and I am only to love myself as I love my neighbor or any other created being that is, only in and for God." - William Law

"When by comparing a number of cases agreeing in some circumstances, but differing in others, and all attended with the same result, a philosopher connects, as a general law of nature, the event with its physical cause, he is said to proceed according to the method of induction." - Dugald Stewart

"With whole-hearted devotion to sew and to weave; to love not gossip and silly laughter; in cleanliness and order to prepare the wine and food for serving guests, may be called the characteristics of womanly work." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

"Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?" - Elif Safak

"Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter, dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found, a love that makes breath poor and speech unable." - William Shakespeare

"The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones." - Emile Zola

"The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions. It is the threshold to the NEW LIFE, the new HOUSE OF MAN AND HUMANITY. As such it must be of the spirit of the new life, harmonious with the construction of the new edifice." - Emma Goldman

"It was Plato who bridged the gap between poetry and philosophy; for, in his work, appearance, despised by his Eleatic and Sophist predecessors, became a reflected image of perfection. He set poets the task of writing philosophically, not only in the sense of giving instruction, but in the sense of striving, by the imitation of appearance, to arrive at its true essence and to show its insufficiency measured by the beauty of the Idea." - Erich Auerbach

"If we're trying to set education policy, we have to listen to the education experts." - Eugene Peterson

"The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when solutions donÂ’t work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility. We need pruning. Cut back to our roots, we learn this psalm and discover the quietness of the weaned child, the tranquility of maturing trust. It is such a minute psalm that many have overlooked it, but for all its brevity and lack of pretense, it is essential. For every Christian encounters problems of growth and difficulties of development." - Eugene Peterson

"The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

"When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest, in that moment God will endow us with powerÂ… unseen power, without which no man can do his best." - Ezra Taft Benson

"When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives. Our love of the Lord will govern the claims for our affection, the demands on our time, the interests we pursue, and the order of our priorities." - Ezra Taft Benson

"We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it." - Felix Adler