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

Heinz Pagels

Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.

Mind | Order | Reality | Reason | Science | System | Universe | Vision | Wisdom |

Thomas Paine

Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.

Man | Principles | Science | System | Universe | Wisdom |

Bons (Leonidovich) Pasternak

Can a man control his future? Yes. Despite the system they live under, men everywhere have, I believe, more power over the future than ever before. The important thing is that we must choose to exercise it. What we do today determines how the world shall go, for tomorrow is made up of the sum total of today's experiences... Far from feeling hopeless or helpless, we must seize every opportunity, however small, to help the world around us toward peace, productivity and human brotherhood.

Brotherhood | Control | Future | Important | Man | Men | Opportunity | Peace | Power | System | Tomorrow | Wisdom | World |

Kenneth R. Pelletier

Inherent in any system of belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy: what is expected is observed and what is observed confirms the expectations. When an individual alters his belief system he becomes aware of vast new realms of possibility.

Belief | Individual | Prophecy | Self | System | Wisdom |

Paul Pearsall

All disease is brain disease... Only when the immune system is viewed as a world system will disease be reduced.

Disease | System | Will | Wisdom | World |

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Property is theft; property is liberty: these two propositions stand side by side in my System of Economic Contradictions and each is shown to be true.

Liberty | Property | System | Wisdom |

George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala

Life is a system of relations rather than a positive and independent existence; and he who would be happy himself and make others happy must carefully preserve these relations. He cannot stand apart in surly and haughty egotism; let him learn that he is as much dependent others as others are on him.

Existence | Happy | Life | Life | System | Wisdom | Learn |

Timothy Sprigge, fully Timothy L.S. Sprigge

If this is correct, all that is contained in a single divine consciousness within which an inconceivably vast number of streams of finite experience interact and interweave. When the lower level streams of experience which correspond to the basic items postulated in physics enter into appropriately complex relations with each other they form aggregates (and aggregates of aggregates) which are what living things are in themselves, and which underpin the emergence of the streams of consciousness of animals and men. Within such streams of consciousness, more particularly the human, a not self aspect, which is primarily the physical world as it is for us, confronts a self aspect, and serves as its representation of the system of interweaving streams of experience n the midst of which it exists and with which it must interact appropriately in order to survive, communicate with other similar selves, and realize its personal essence as fully as it can.

Consciousness | Experience | Men | Order | Self | System | Wisdom | World |

Lyall Watson

We are exactly like a galaxy in or fine anatomy. Matter moves through you and me as easily as the wind blows through the branches of a tree. And the boundaries we draw at the limits of our skin are as arbitrary as those which separate our solar system from the next one. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, in the best traditions of ecology, but it goes further than that. Everything is everything else. There is no difference - and nothing is impossible.

Nothing | System | Wisdom |

Daniel Amen

New research suggests that the brain influences, and may, in fact, be wired to experience God or deep spirituality. Religious experience often stems from temporal-lobe and limbic system function,, and obsessions (religious and others) stem from too much activity in the anterior cingulated gyrus and basal ganglia.

Experience | God | Research | Spirituality | System | God |

Carol Adrienne

You are a self-organizing system in an invisible field of energy organized by your purpose and a stream of continuous information. Information is the nutrient of a self-organizing system… It is by knowing yourself that your purpose is revealed.

Energy | Knowing | Purpose | Purpose | Self | System |

Alan Stuart Blinder

Our American system of government by lobbyist guarantees us a form of taxation with representation that the founding father did not foresee: special interests get the representation while the broad public gets the taxation.

Father | Government | Public | System | Government |

A. J. Ayer, Alfred Jules Ayer

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

Authority | Rest | System |

William Blake

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare. My business is to create.

Business | Man | Reason | System | Will | Business |

Joe Boot

Any living system must do at least three things: process energy, store information, and replicate.

Energy | System |

Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding

There are three basic types of human transactions: (1) the threat system – “Give it to me or I’ll kill you” or today’s more sophisticated version: “How much will you pay me to stop harming or annoying you?”… (2) the exchange system, the narrow waveband of market transactions with which economics concerns itself, and (3) the integrative system, i.e., the transactions based on the love, sharing, and altruism of which human beings are capable in spite of the denial of these phenomena in economic theory.

Altruism | Economics | Kill | Love | Phenomena | System | Will |

James W. Douglass

The first things to be disputed by our commitment to nonviolence will be not the system but our own lives.

Commitment | System | Will |