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

Richard Cecil

I extend the circle of real religion very widely. Many men fear God, and love God, and have sincere desire to serve him, whose views of religious truth are very imperfect, and in some points utterly false. But may not many such persons have a state of heart acceptable before God?

Desire | Fear | God | Heart | Love | Men | Religion | Truth | Wisdom |

John Caird

Carry religious principles into common life, and common life will lose its transitoriness. The world passes away. The things are seen as temporal. Soon business, with all its cares and anxieties, the whole “unprofitable stir and fever of the world” will be to us a thing of the past. But religion does something better than sigh and moan over the perishableness of earthly things. It finds in them the seeds of immortality.

Better | Business | Immortality | Life | Life | Past | Principles | Religion | Will | Wisdom | World |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life.

Life | Life | Religion | Rhetoric | Wisdom | Old |

François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand

There is no religion without mystery. God Himself is the great secret of Nature.

God | Mystery | Nature | Religion | Wisdom | God |

Victor Cousin

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

Nothing | Philosophy | Wisdom |

Nathanial Culverwell, also spelled Nathaniel Culverwell

See, then, how powerful religion is; it commands the heart, it commands the vitals. Morality - that comes with a pruning-knife, and cuts off the sproutings, all wild and luxuriances; but religion lays the axe to the root of the tree. Morality looks that the skin of the apple be fair; but religion searcheth to the very core.

Heart | Looks | Morality | Religion | Wisdom |

Hermann Cohen

Ethics is the vital principle of Judaism. Its religion aims to be, and is, moral doctrine. Love of God is knowledge of God, and that is knowledge of the ultimate moral purpose of mankind.

Aims | Doctrine | Ethics | God | Knowledge | Love | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Religion | Wisdom | God |

Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

Let your religion be seen. Lamps do not talk, but they do shine. A light house sounds no drum, it beats no gong; yet, far over the waters, its friendly light is seen by the mariner.

Light | Religion | Wisdom |

John Dewey

The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.

Action | Experience | Faith | Future | Reality | Religion | Sense | Will | Wisdom |

Frances Power Cobbe

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

Morality | Religion | Wisdom |

Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly

In my religion there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry and doubt.

Doctrine | Doubt | Love | Poetry | Religion | Wisdom |

Henry P. Van Dusen

Religion is the reaching out of one's whole being - mind, body, spirit, emotions, intuitions, affections, will - for completion, for inner unity, for true relation with those about us, for right relation to the universe in which we live. Religion is life, a certain kind of life, life as it should and could be, a life of harmony within and true adjustment without - life, therefore, in harmony with the life of God himself.

Body | Emotions | God | Harmony | Life | Life | Mind | Religion | Right | Spirit | Unity | Universe | Will | Wisdom | God |

Albert Einstein

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

Admiration | God | Power | Religion | Universe | Wisdom |

Tyron Edwards

Temperance is to the body what religion is to the soul, the foundation and source of health and strength and peace.

Body | Health | Peace | Religion | Soul | Strength | Wisdom |

Harold Willis Dodds

Be sure to find a place for intellectual and cultural interests outside your daily occupation. It is necessary that you do so if this business of living is not to turn to dust and ashes in your mouth. Moreover, do not overlook the claims of religion as the explanation of an otherwise unintelligible world. It is not the fast tempo of modern life that kills but the boredom, a lack of strong interest and failure to grow that destroy. It is the feeling that nothing is worth while that makes men ill and unhappy.

Business | Destroy | Failure | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Occupation | Religion | Wisdom | World | Worth | Failure | Business |

John Dewey

We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition.

Aspiration | Events | Force | Imagination | Intelligence | Life | Life | Meaning | Philosophy | Poetry | Practice | Revelation | Science | Will | Wisdom | Circumstance |