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

David Hume

We may begin with considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally bound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature.

Character | Feelings | Force | Men | Nature | Rest | Sympathy |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Character | Idealism | Malice | Stupidity | Zeal |

Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.

Cause | Character | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Wrong |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

I began to accept that the meaning of life, even the purpose of the pain that accompanies it, would be found not in the question I asked of life, but in the questions life asked of me.

Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Pain | Purpose | Purpose | Question |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Man’s final end, the purpose of his existence, is to love, know and be united with the immanent and transcendent God head. And this identification of self with spiritual not-self can be achieved only by “dying to” selfness and living to spirit.

Character | Existence | God | Love | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Spirit | God |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked.

Character | Conduct | God | Indispensable | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Virtue | Virtue | God |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Adoration is an activity of the loving, but still separate individuality. Contemplation is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being. The highest prayer is the most passive. Inevitably; for the less there is of self, the more there is of God.

Character | Contemplation | God | Individuality | Prayer | Self | Contemplation |

Louis Kronenberger

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all... of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Age | Character | Faith | Inquiry | Morality | Mystical | Science | Superstition | Truth |

James Joll

The tragedy of all political action is that some problems have no solution; none of the alternatives are intellectually consistent or morally uncompromising; and whatever decision is taken will harm somebody.

Action | Character | Decision | Harm | Problems | Tragedy | Will |

Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva

No man can force the harp of his own individuality into the people’s heart; but every man may play upon the chords of the people’s heart, who draws his inspiration from the people’s instinct.

Character | Force | Heart | Individuality | Inspiration | Instinct | Man | People | Play |

Walter Kerr, fully Walter Francis Kerr

The work we are doing is more or less the work we meant to do in life [but] it does not yield us the feeling of accomplishment we had expected... If I were required to put into a single sentence my own explanation of the state of our hearts, heads, and nerves, I would do it this way: we are vaguely wretched because we are leading half-lives, half-heartedly, and with only one-half of our minds actively, engaged in making contact with the universe about us.

Accomplishment | Character | Life | Life | Universe | Work |

Jaron Lanier, fully Jaron Zepel Lanier

Life is based on limitation and compromise. The fact that we forget the meaning of life is the meaning of life. Being in a state of partial awareness allows experience and life to progress. God, as an omniscient being, is not an “experiencing being” because his or her experience is not new. If You were going to start a universe, what would Your options be? You could choose to remain totally stagnant, but that wouldn’t amount to a true universe. You’d need entities that experience it, entities that are fragile and temporary and not omniscient. That’s who we are and why we’re here.

Awareness | Character | Experience | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Need | Progress | Universe | Awareness |

Stewart B. Johnson

Our business in life is not to get ahead of others but to get ahead of ourselves - to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterdays by our today, to do our work with more force than ever before.

Business | Character | Force | Life | Life | Work | Business |

Holger Kalweit

Our culture needs a great deal more than a changed lifestyle. In the Western mind, thought-structures and the relationship between consciousness and matter are badly out of balance, so that our world has become wholly pervaded by a materialism that is threatening to squash us to death. We are in a state of materialistic hypertrophy, and our eventual self-destruction would in fact be no more than the logical consequence of our attitudes.

Balance | Character | Consciousness | Culture | Death | Materialism | Mind | Relationship | Self | Thought | World |

Philip Kapleau

In giving yourself over wholly to whatever you are doing at the moment you can achieve a deeper and richer state of mind.

Character | Giving | Mind |

Marwa Kisare, fully Zedekia Marwa Kisare

God is both the purpose (the why) and manner (the how) of my existence.

Character | Existence | God | Purpose | Purpose |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

Character | Darkness | Existence | Light | Purpose | Purpose |

Roger L'Estrange, fully Sir Roger L'Estrange

All duties are matter of conscience, with this restriction that a superior obligation suspends the force of an inferior one.

Character | Conscience | Force | Obligation |