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

Albert Schweitzer

We will never comprehend why the infinite will, in order to realize its completion, requires the incomplete, or how evil can result in good. No forced attempt to reason out these events can give us peace of God. There is a different way, a way born from inward experience. We may not have been given the privilege of understanding how events are expressing the will of God. But one thing we do know, and on that knowledge all else depends – the will of God is directed only toward one thing: the spiritual.

Events | Evil | Experience | God | Good | Knowledge | Order | Peace | Reason | Understanding | Will | God | Privilege |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do whatever we ought... The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

Freedom | Power | Right |

Katha Upanishad

Above the senses is the mind. Above the mind is the intellect. Above the intellect is the ego. Above the ego is the unmanifested seed, the Primal Cause. And verily beyond the unmanifested seed is the self, the unconditioned Knowing whom one attains to freedom and achieves immortality.

Cause | Ego | Freedom | Immortality | Knowing | Mind | Self | Intellect |

Kerry Thornley, fully Kerry Wendell Thornley, aka Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or Lord Omar

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

Order |

Robert V. Taylor, aka The Very Reverend Robert V. Taylor

Compassion leads to freedom of discovering your voice, your gifts, and your purpose.

Compassion | Freedom | Purpose | Purpose |

Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle

Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.

Freedom |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness.

Absence | Art | Cruelty | Discipline | Freedom | Ignorance | Inactivity | Lying | Murder | Treachery | War | Weapons | Words | World | Art |

United Nations NULL

Article 18 - Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Belief | Change | Conscience | Freedom of thought | Freedom | Practice | Public | Religion | Right | Thought | Worship |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

I believe that the true welfare of man lies in the fulfillment of the Will of God; and that His will consists in men loving each other, and therefore behaving toward others as they desire that others should behave with them. I believe that the meaning of life of every man, therefore, lies only in the increase of love in himself; that this increase of love leads the individual man in this life toward greater and greater welfare; that after death it gives the greater welfare the more love there be in the man; and that, at the same time, more than anything else, it contributes to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, i.e., to an order of life where the discord, deceit, and violence which now reign will be replaced by free agreement, truth, and brotherly love between men.

Death | Deceit | Desire | Earth | Fulfillment | God | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Men | Order | Time | Truth | Will | God |

Allen Tate, fully John Orley Allen Tate

Man is a creature that in the long run has got to believe in order to know, and to know in order to do.

Man | Order |

Alexander Whyte

God has established prayer in the moral world in order “to communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality.” That is to say, to give us a touch and a taste of what it is to be a Creator.

Dignity | God | Order | Prayer | Taste | World |

Stephen Wolfram

Computational irreducibility tends to make infinite questions undecidable. The presence of universality implies that there must at some level be computational irreducibility… This means that today’s mathematics will be viewed as small and surprisingly uncharacteristic sample of what is possible. If a system is computationally irreducible this means that there is in effect a tangible separation between the underlying rules for the system and its overall behavior associated with the irreducible amount of computational work needed to go from one to the other. And it is this separation that the basic origin of the apparent freedom we see in all sorts of system lie – whether those systems are abstract cellular automata or actual living brains.

Abstract | Behavior | Freedom | Mathematics | Means | System | Will | Work |

World Council of Churches NULL

Religious liberty includes freedom to change one’ religion or belief without consequent social, economic and political disabilities. Implicit in this right is the right freely to maintain one’s belief or disbelief without external coercion or disability.

Belief | Change | Coercion | Disbelief | Freedom | Liberty | Religion | Right |