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

John Welwood

Look at our present life circumstances, whatever they may be, as the raw material of our learning... We must stop regarding ourselves as victims of circumstances, and start to acknowledge that we are not here purely by accident. The master within is trying to help us wake up by confronting us with our current life situation, which contains all the lessons we need to learn in order to grow into more fully developed human beings.

Accident | Character | Circumstances | Learning | Life | Life | Need | Order | Present | Learn |

Margaret Young, born Margaret Youngblood

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Character | Money | Need | Order | People | Will |

John Welwood

Life is like the ocean, forever trying to wear away our narrow self-concepts, which compromise its freedom and vastness.

Character | Freedom | Life | Life | Self |

Simone Weil

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

Character | Life | Life | Order | People | Suffering |

Alan Barth

Security is never absolute... The government of a free people must take certain chances for the sake of maintaining freedom which the government of a police state avoids because it holds freedom to be of no value.

Absolute | Freedom | Government | People | Security | Wisdom | Government |

M. Beer

Man's freedom is his inner worth; His guilt alone can rob him of it.

Freedom | Guilt | Man | Wisdom | Worth |

John Stuart Blakie

Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.

Existence | Law | Order | Time | Truth | Wisdom |

Léon Blum, fully André Léon Blum

The cause of Freedom and the cause of Peace are bound together.

Cause | Freedom | Peace | Wisdom |

Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch

In the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.

Discipline | Freedom | Wisdom |

Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne

Governments which suppress freedom of speech... act like children who shut their eyes in order not to be seen.

Children | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Order | Speech | Wisdom |

James Boswell

All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Experience | Freedom | Will | Wisdom |

Samuel Bowles III

The cause of freedom is the cause of God.

Cause | Freedom | God | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one.

Freedom | Liberty | Wisdom |

William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade

Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.

Law | Nature | Order | Play | Sense | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

Man | Order | Wealth | Wisdom | Worship |