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

Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger

The consciousness of abiding safety in the bosom of the Church is one of the most serious obstacles to an honest confrontation with the Christian faith.

Church | Consciousness | Faith |

L. Francis Edmunds

The universe appears to us in two opposite parts, I and World. We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as soon as consciousness first dawn on us… Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we begin again to find the unity out of which we have separated ourselves… Our thinking links us to the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves and thus makes us individuals.

Consciousness | Dawn | Thinking | Thought | Unity | Universe | World |

John Dewey

The primary business of school is to train children to co-operative and mutually helpful living; to foster in them the consciousness of mutual interdependence.

Business | Children | Consciousness | Business |

Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

It is the consciousness of love by which man reconciles himself with God, or rather with his own nature as represented in the moral law.

Consciousness | God | Law | Love | Man | Moral law | Nature |

Elio Frattaroli

Symptoms are part of the healing process. Anxiety is consciousness trying to happen. Falling down is a way of growing up.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Consciousness |

Elio Frattaroli

Without a direct causal link between brain processes and consciousness, there is no persuasive reason to believe that consciousness emerged from the brain, or through natural selection, at all.

Consciousness | Reason |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

Faith is nothing but a living, wide-awake consciousness of God within.

Consciousness | Faith | God | Nothing | God |

Owen Flanagan

Three claims: (1) Consciousness exists. There exist conscious mental states, events, and processes that have the property of being conscious. (2) Consciousness has depth, hidden structure, hidden and possibly multiple functions, and hidden natural and cultural history. Conscious mental states supervene on brain states. (3) Conscious mental states, processes, events – possibly conscious supervisory faculties, if there are any – are heterogeneous in phenomenal world. A theory of consciousness will in the end be part of a unified theory of the mind.

Consciousness | Events | History | Mind | Property | Will | World |

Stephen A. Erickson

A grand meta-narrative is a story of the development and purpose of human history in which we as individual can find a place and play a role. Four basic meta-narratives: (1) Platonic Christian is the idea of life as a journey to another unchanging realm. (2) Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of the consciousness of God. (3) Marx’s notion of another revolution ushering in a new era. (4) Nietzsche’s idea that there is no “beyond” and that the only meaning comes through creative activities through which we shape a life for ourselves.

Consciousness | Era | God | History | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Story |

Elio Frattaroli

If, as Heraclitus said, “A man’s character is his fate” – that is, if our fate is largely determined by the habitual tendencies of our repetition compulsion-personality – then the power of consciousness is that it allows us to change impulses, we have what Kierkegaard called “the possibility of possibility”: the possibility of having a free choice and the moral responsibility that comes with it. In that sense, the fear of consciousness is ultimately the fear of moral responsibility, because if we own our anxiety, shame, and guilt, and allow ourselves to have full consciousness of emotions that motivate our behavior, then we will inevitably recognize the full weight of our responsibility for that behavior.

Anxiety | Anxiety | Behavior | Change | Character | Choice | Consciousness | Emotions | Fate | Fear | Free choice | Guilt | Man | Personality | Power | Responsibility | Sense | Shame | Will | Fate |

Benjamin Franklin

One’s true happiness depends more upon one’s own judgment of one’s self, or a consciousness of rectitude in action and intention, and the approbation of those few, who judge impartially, than upon the applause of the unthinking, undiscerning multitude, who are apt to cry Hosanna today, and tomorrow, Crucify him.

Action | Applause | Consciousness | Intention | Judgment | Self | Tomorrow | Happiness |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

Calibrations are merely a shorthand means of denoting a level of consciousness that specifies both context and content. Each level has its own view of what is real and meaningful. This results in differences in motivation, value, lifestyle, or spiritual positionalities.

Consciousness | Means |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

If practically everything in one’s life depends on the evolution of the level of one’s consciousness, it would seem that, aside from the mere survival needs, developing the level of consciousness would eclipse all other endeavors in importance. That would seem to be so, but that has to be integrated into the overall context of one’s life. Endeavors and activities can remain the same but need to be recontextualized and repositioned within a spiritual framework. To spiritualize one’s life, it is necessary only to shift one’s motive. To constantly be aware of one’s actual motive tends to bring up positionality and the pairs of opposites, such as gain versus service or love versus greed.

Consciousness | Evolution | Greed | Life | Life | Love | Need | Service | Survival |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

The evolution of consciousness requires a wide range of opportunities and a playing field that affords almost unlimited options for development. If human life represents a learning process, then society is the ideal school that affords an extremely wide range of options for numerous levels of consciousness to develop, progress, define, identify, and grasp endless subtleties as well as learn more gross lessons. The ego is extremely tenacious and therefore often seems to require extreme conditions before it lets go of a positionality. It often takes the collective experience of millions of people over many centuries to learn even what appears upon examination to be a simple and obvious truth, namely, that peace is better than war or love is better than hate.

Better | Consciousness | Ego | Evolution | Experience | Extreme | Hate | Learning | Life | Life | Love | Peace | People | Progress | Society | Truth | War | Society | Learn |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

Spiritual goals tend to become increasingly important and integrity becomes the yardstick of happiness. This leads to the evolution of consciousness in which the ultimate goal becomes the perfection of one’s relationship with God.

Consciousness | Evolution | Goals | God | Important | Integrity | Perfection | Relationship |

Bede Griffiths, born Alan Richard Griffiths and also known as Swami Dayananda (Bliss of Compassion

There is an experience of being in pure consciousness which gives lasting peace to the soul. It is an experience of the Ground or Depth of being in the Centre of the soul, an awareness of the mystery of being beyond sense and thought, which gives a sense of fulfillment, of finality, of absolute truth.

Absolute | Awareness | Consciousness | Experience | Fulfillment | Mystery | Peace | Sense | Soul | Thought | Truth | Awareness |

Václav Havel

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect in human weakness and in human responsibility. Without a global resolution in human consciousness nothing will change for the better and catastrophe will be unavoidable.

Better | Change | Consciousness | Global | Heart | Nothing | Power | Resolution | Responsibility | Salvation | Weakness | Will | World |