Great Throughts Treasury

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

Rufus Jones, fully Rufus Matthew Jones

American Writer, Magazine Editor, Philosopher, College Philosophy Professor, Quaker Historian of Mysticism and Theologian, Co-founder of the American Friends Service Committee which has won the Nobel Prize

"[Conscience] is the voice of our ideal self, our complete self, our real self, laying its call upon the will."

"But salvation is not a transaction; it is the formation of a new life. There is but one salvation for all mankind and that is the life of God in the soul."

"God finds His complete Life in and through us as we find ours in and through Him and through each other in love and joy and cooperation."

"God, to be God, must transcend what is. He must be the maker of what ought to be."

"I think if you lower the limits on money it would encourage our elected officials to get into their districts... to interact with the average citizen to encourage more people to contribute smaller amounts to get their message across."

"In any case, fighting will not settle whether the claims were just or unjust. It will only settle which nation can mobilize and handle its fighting forces and its economic forces the better."

"It has always been a two-way road. It is a Double Search. God is forever seeking us from the Love that comes down from Above. And man is forever striving for eternal reality and the Beauty of the Lord, our God."

"Nations are not thugs. They are bodies of intelligent people."

"No lawyer can afford to be ignorant of the Bible."

"Serenity comes not alone by removing the outward causes and occasions of fear, but by the discovery of inward reservoirs to draw upon."

"God is not an abstract reality, an absolute Alone, at the far end of Bethel-ladders and Babel-towers. He is central in the stream of Life and Love and Truth and Beauty. The reason we can hope to find God is that He is here, engaged all the time in finding us."

"The first thing you've got to do is get a client. You can go up there and lobby all day long, but if you don't have a client, you're in trouble!"

"The new age cannot live on naturalism or on secularism. Life becomes sterile and futile without the depth and power which come from participation in eternal realities. But this new age cannot any more successfully live on religious faiths that are out of harmony with known truth, or that hang loose in the air, cut apart from the fundamental intellectual culture of the age. The hour has struck for the serious business of rediscovering the foundations, and of interpenetrating all life and thought with the truths and realities of a victorious religious faith."

"The reason why we can hope to find God is that He is here, engaged all the time in finding us. Every pulse of love is a tendril that draws us in His direction. Every verification of truth links the finite mind up into a Foundational Mind that undergirds us. Every deed of good will points toward a consummate Goodness which fulfills all our tiny adventures in faith. We can find Him because in Him we live and move and have our being."

"The unwarped child, with his spontaneous faith and confidence in goodness, is the best illustration of that spirit which fits the Kingdom of God."

"There is no great future for any people whose faith has burned out."

"There must be amidst all the confusions of the hour a tried and undisturbed remnant of persons who will not become purveyors of coercion and violence, who are ready to stand alone, if it is necessary, for the way of peace and love among men."

"True joy is not a thing of moods, not a capricious emotion, tied to fluctuating experiences. It is a state and condition of the soul. It survives through pain and sorrow and, like a subterranean spring, waters the whole life. It is intimately allied and bound up with love and goodness, and so is deeply rooted in the life of God."

"We are no more bankrupt in our capacity for finding God than in our capacity for finding harmony, or beauty, or moral goodness, or truth. We shall not find all there is of any of these values, but all we do is find is real, and is good to live by. So also with our findings of God, they do not exhaust His being. They do not carry us to the full height of all that He is. But what we have proves to be solid building material for life-purposes, and every spiritual gain that is achieved makes the next one more possible and more sure."

"When the war ends, it will be found that there was an equal amount of huggery practiced on both sides, that terrible things were done to force the final victory."

"Whether in times of war or times of peace the Quaker is under peculiar obligation to assist and to forward movements and forces which make for peace in the world and which bind men together in ties of unity and fellowship."

"All great prayer is born out of intense earnestness and out of a consciousness that only God through us as a feeble organ of His will can accomplish what we seek and what we need."

"As the sap flows through the branches of the vine and vitalizes the whole organism so that it burst into the beauty and glory of foliage and blossom and finally into fruit, so through the lives of men and women, inwardly receptive, the life of God flows, carrying vitality, awakening love, creating passion for goodness, kindling the fervor of consecration and producing that living body, that organism of the Spirit, that 'blessed community' which continues through the centuries the revelation of God as love and tenderness and eternal goodness?"

"But we cannot find Him with a little fraction of ourselves?.It is the business of the whole self, it is the task of the entire life of man."

"Fortunately we do not need to understand vital processes and energies of life before we utilize them and start living by them."

"Friends come back from their worship with a new sense of ordination, but not the ordination of human hands. Something has happened in the stillness that makes the heart more tender, more sensitive, more shocked by evil, more dedicated to ideals of life, and more eager to push back the skirts of darkness and to widen the area of light and love"

"George Fox and his circle of Friends knew only too well that they were merely a remnant? but he lived and died in the faith that the Quaker group was the Seed of an immense world-wide harvest that would... Eventually become universal."

"God's work, the doing of His will, is extraordinarily inclusive - raising food on the land, ordering a nurturing home, taking care of a child with loving insight, speaking simple truth, spreading love abroad in any spot of the world, praying and working for the Kingdom of God, being heroic in quiet ways, saying the right word when others do not dare, walking straight forward in the path of duty - these are some of the ways of doing God's will."

"He is the eyes of a new creation, with its inexhaustible implications and possibilities."

"His place in history?.is not found by studying the short span of years that He lived in Galilee and Judea, but it includes as well the whole process of transformation which His life and spirit have wrought through the centuries. History would be quite another matter if He were eliminated from its story."

"I have a profound faith that the times are ripe for a signal advance in religious belief and life and practice - for a Christianity translated into the terms of life and thought and action of the age in which we are actually living. There cannot be any great continuing civilization without the undergirding of religious inspiration?."

"I visited Fuller every day for the first 20 or 30 years of my life. In those days, there was no pool and the park had limited amenities. Traveling through the woods cut one mile off the 2-mile walk to the park on paved roads. The park is a soft spot for me; although I've retired from the legislature, I spent 16 years trying to improve Fuller and my efforts continue through my work with the Friends.?"

"If God ever spoke, He is still speaking. If He has ever been in mutual and reciprocal communication with the persons He has made, He is still a communicating God, as eager as ever to have listening and receptive souls. If there is something of His image and superscription in our inmost structure and being, we ought to expect a continuous revelation of His will and purpose through the ages?.He is the Great I Am, not a Great He Was."

"If we are to prove that Fox really struck a jet of living water, we ourselves must tap that same fountain."

"It contains the best story material by which the minds of children have ever been trained, and it is the greatest literature of revelation that has come out of the far past of the race."

"It seems to me tremendously important that Christ is as truly a revelation of man as He is a revelation of God. We see at last in Him what man was meant to be?.We have seen God revealed in Christ. I wish now that we might learn to see the divine possibilities of man revealed in Christ."

"Let a person's inner being be fortified with a faith in God and all his creative powers are quickened, his marching strength is heightened and his grip on everyday things is immensely increased. It is as though he had tapped a hidden reservoir of power."

"Mystical experience?is no more difficult than any other supreme achievement."

"Mysticism ought to be thought of simply as the experience of direct communion with the soul of God."

"No one, I am sure, will suppose that I think that a religious experience is a substitute for a sound economic, or social, or financial, or political solution of the world's troubles. I only mean that we must deepen the quality of life and enlarge our faith in the scope of human destinies before any of the fine schemes on hand will work."

"Nobody knows how the kindling flame of life and power leaps from one life to another. What is the magic quality in a person which instantly awakens faith. You listen to a hundred persons unmoved and unchanged: you hear a few quiet words from the man with the kindling torch and you suddenly discover what life means for you forevermore, and you become forthwith another man --carrying perhaps your own torch."

"Our human nature is unmistakably double. There is something in us that the divine Spirit can make its appeal to, something that draws us upward and onward, something that makes our moral and spiritual life possible. It think that this divine spark in us?is the most significant thing about us."

"Prayer will always rise or fall with the quality of one's faith, like the mercury in the tube which feels at once the change of pressure in the atmosphere. It is only out of live faith that a living prayer springs."

"The first stage of 'entry into life' for Jesus is learning to love. To start executing a 'social program' without the creative and motive power of a great love behind it is like building a factory and forgetting to attach the machinery to any driving energy that would turn the wheels."

"The greatest single fact of history is the breaking in of the Life of God through this unique Life. Here at last the Love of God found complete expression."

"The home is the most favorable place on earth for transmitting to the new-born child the spiritual gains of the race and for the formation of a well-organized moral and spiritual character. The greatest thing a true home produces is the cementing power of love and tenderness and the stabilizing quality of faith in eternal Reality. The restoration of the home as the spiritual nursery of the children God gives us, is the major task of our time."

"The mystic is a person possessed of conviction, which for him amounts to an experience, that he has come upon the goal of life, that he has come back to the spiritual Source of his being?.that he has in very truth found God."

"The one really big business in this world or in any world is the business of being a coordinator, a transmitter, of the love of God, the love of God revealed in a man like us."

"The only flowing refutation of the materialism and secularism of our time is a personal life which demonstrates a source of spiritual power."

"The reason we can hope to find God is that He is here, engaged all the time in finding us."