Great Throughts Treasury

"People become infected with good will and compassion. It’s a state of being as real as any physiological condition - and it spreads to others just like a virus."

"There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality."

"Our most urgent and pressing need is to provide that wonderful instrument, the human mind, with the wherewithal to imagine, and thereby create, a better world."

"The meaning of life is felt through relationship... Relationship with others and with one’s own self... Parenting, teaching, serving, creating. Learning from nature, the sages, our peers, from our emerging selves in a state of becoming."

"You must remember that nothing happens quite by chance. It’s a question of accretion of information and experience... it’s just chance that I happened to be here at this particular time when there was available and at my disposal the great experience of all the investigators who plodded along for a number of years."

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next. "

"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality. "

"I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams. "

"The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more. "

"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

"I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like."

"What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other."

"This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it."

"Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience. "

"Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process, and nature in marking man's papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive."

"Reason alone will not serve. Intuition alone can be improved by reason, but reason alone without intuition can easily lead the wrong way. They both are necessary. "