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

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.

Man | Obedience | Past | Time | Wisdom |

William Penn

Inquiry is human; blind obedience brutal. Truth never loses by the one but often suffers by the other... O God, help us not to despise or oppose what we do not understand.

Despise | God | Inquiry | Obedience | Truth | Wisdom |

William Penn

If thou wouldst conquer thy weakness, thou must never gratify it. No man is compelled to evil; his consent only makes it his. It is no sin to be tempted, but to be overcome.

Evil | Man | Sin | Weakness | Wisdom |

Francis Quarles

Let the ground of all thy religious actions be obedience; examine not why it is commanded, but observe it because it is commanded. True obedience neither procrastinates nor questions.

Obedience | Wisdom |

Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

Habit | Men | Obedience | Power | Rule | Wisdom |

Al-Anṭākī , full name Yaḥya ibn Saʿīd al-Anṭākī NULL

Question: What is the most harmful sin? Answer: The sin thou dost not know to be a sin.

Question | Sin |

Paul Billheimer

The continuous and widespread fragmentation of the church has been the scandal of the ages. It has been Satan’s master strategy. The sin of disunity probably has caused more souls to be lost than all other sins combined.

Church | Satan | Scandal | Sin |

Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister

Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.

Abuse | Children | Commitment | Conscience | God | Individual | Law | Morality | Obedience | Sin | Soul |

Robert McAfee Brown

Most newspaper headlines are more effective examples of man’s sin writ large than any book on theology can ever hope to be.

Hope | Man | Sin | Theology |

Herbert Butterfield, fully Sir Herbert Butterfield

In the kind of world that I see in history there is one sin that locks people up in all their other sins… the sin of self-righteousness.

History | People | Righteousness | Self | Self-righteousness | Sin | World |

Lydian Emerson, also Lidian Emerson, born Lydia Jackson

The only sin which people never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Opinion | People | Sin | Forgive |

Father Cuthbert

Until a man realizes sin as the death of his own higher self and as a rebellion against the law of his true happiness, there is no true conversion of heart towards the higher life.

Death | Heart | Law | Life | Life | Man | Rebellion | Self | Sin |

Dhammapada NULL

Faith is wealth! Obedience is wealth! Modesty also is wealth! Hearing is wealth, and so is Charity! Wisdom is sevenfold riches.

Charity | Faith | Modesty | Obedience | Riches | Wealth | Wisdom |

Jacques Ellul

Action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is not obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable.

Absurd | Action | Authority | Justification | Obedience | Past | Receive | Will | Propaganda |

Mary Baker Eddy

Both sin and sickness are error, and Truth is their remedy.

Error | Sin | Truth |

Charles Fillmore

It is not a crime to be rich, nor a virtue to be poor… The sin lies in hoarding wealth and keeping it from circulating freely to all who need it.

Crime | Need | Sin | Virtue | Virtue | Wealth |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

In our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns.

Authority | Effort | Individual | Self | Submission |