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

Alexander Pope

Get your enemies to read your works in order to mend them, for your friend is so much your second self that he will judge too like you.

Friend | Order | Self | Will | Wisdom |

J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine

There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics.

Dreams | Law | Man | Mind | Order | Religion | Universe | Wisdom | World |

J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine

If parapsychology deals with all the personality manifestations that are beyond explanation by physics, then by definition it should claim the entire spiritual order of reality.

Order | Personality | Reality | Wisdom |

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or the instrument of government - but the reverse... If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom, no religious freedom, no freedom of families to make their own decisions [regarding having children]. All these freedoms tend to reinforce on another.

Children | Freedom | Government | Society | Will | Wisdom | Government |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The training of children is a profession where we must know to lose time in order to gain it.

Children | Order | Time | Training | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards. To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children.

Children | Day | Liberty | Men | Need | Nothing | Order | Patriotism | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Wisdom | Work |

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer

Each truth sparkles with a light of its own, yet it always reflects some light upon another; a truth, while lighting another, springs from one, in order to penetrate another. The first truth is an abundant sense, from which all others are colored, and each particular truth, in its turn, resembles a great river that divides into an infinite number of rivulets.

Light | Order | Sense | Truth | Wisdom |

V. S. Seturaman

The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.

Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |

Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

One of the principal ingredients in the happiness of childhood is freedom from suspicion - why may it not be combined with a more extensive intercourse with mankind? A disposition to dwell on the bright side of character is like gold to its possessor; but to imagine more evil than meets the eye, betrays affinity for it.

Character | Childhood | Evil | Freedom | Gold | Mankind | Suspicion | Wisdom | Happiness |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to lose time in order to gain it.

Children | Order | Time | Training | Wisdom |

Albert Schweitzer

By the spirit of the age... the man of today is forced into skepticism about his own thinking, in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him from authority... Truth taken over by skepticism which has become believing... is not capable of uniting itself with him to the very marrow of his being.

Age | Authority | Man | Order | Skepticism | Spirit | Thinking | Truth | Wisdom |

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 |

Sydney Smith

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Calamity | Courage | Order | Wisdom | Calamity |

Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Dynamic | Force | Love | Order | Wisdom |