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

Robert K. Greenleaf

Responsibility . . . requires that a person think, speak and act as if personally accountable to all who may be affected by his or her thoughts, words and deeds… Awareness is important… Am I moving in the right direction? Is my sense of responsibility growing, deepening, becoming sharper and more insistent?.. A sense of responsibility is an attitude, a feeling.

Awareness | Deeds | Important | Responsibility | Right | Sense | Words | Awareness |

Katharine Hepburn, fully Katharine Houghton Hepburn

You can’t change the music of your soul.

Change | Music | Soul |

Allan J Hamilton

Listen to your favorite music. I’m a big advocate of letting patients listen to music through headphones while they are asleep during surgery. It’s been reported they wake up more clearheaded and calm than other patients

Music |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The spirituality that flows from our actions is not fleeting, transient, or solitary in a silent cosmos. The music of refined actions, the melody of a noble soul, is woven into the tapestry of eternal music which God Himself composed.

Eternal | God | Melody | Music | Soul | Spirituality | God |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

The primordial experience is the source of [creativity]… In itself it offers no words or images, for it is a vision seen “as in a glass, darkly.” It is merely a deep presentiment that strives to find expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and, by carrying it aloft, assume a visible shape.

Creativity | Experience | Vision | Words |

Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.

Soul | Words |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Does music make plants grow, or are there among the plans some that are musical?

Music |

Carson McClullers

Three words were in the captain’s heart. He shaped them soundlessly with his trembling lips, as he had not breath to spare for a whisper, “I am lost.” And having given up life, the captain suddenly began to live.

Heart | Life | Life | Words |

Gabriela Mistral

The poet is an untier of knots, and love wqithout words is a knot, and it drowns.

Love | Words |

Thomas Merton

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Despair | Joy | Life | Life | Music | Phenomena | Reality | Sadness | Silence |

Judith M. Newman

Children seem to learn to talk by inventing their own words and rules: by experimenting with language. Children make statements to adults and then wait for adults to put the statements into adult language so they can make a comparison… If the adult says nothing or simply continues the conversation, the child assumes his or her utterance is correct. When adults “correct” – that is, expand in adult language what the children have said – they are providing feedback. The adult and the child are actually speaking different languages, but they understand the situation, the child can compare their different ways of saying the same thing.

Children | Conversation | Language | Nothing | Words | Child | Learn | Understand |

Nasir Khusraw, fully Abu Mo’in Hamid ad-Din Nasir ibn Khusraw al-Qubadiani or Nāsir Khusraw Qubādiyānī, also spelled as Nasir Khusrow and Naser Khosrow

Your words are the seed, your soul is the farmer, the world is your field; let the farmer look to the sowing, that the soil may abundance yield.

Abundance | Soul | Words | World |

Thomas Paine

Those words, “temperate and moderate,” are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing moderately good, if not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is a species of vice.

Cowardice | Cunning | Good | Moderation | Temper | Virtue | Virtue | Words | Moderation |

Arabian Proverbs

The words of the tongue should have three gatekeepers; Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Words |

Francis Quarles

The voice of humility is God’s music and the silence of humility is God’s rhetoric.

God | Humility | Music | Rhetoric | Silence |

William Shenstone

A fool and his words are soon parted.

Words |

Florence Scovel Shinn

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Accuracy | Deeds | Life | Life | Words | Deeds |