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

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind.

Art | Consolation | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Speech | Work | World | Writing | Art |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The thought that you think, you think, which attracts to it - so you think it some more, which attracts to it - so you think it some more. In other words, when you have an expectation, you've got a dominant thought going on, and Law of Attraction is going to deliver that to you again and again and again.

Joy | Life | Life | Money | Success |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

There is a paradigm shift that is afoot because so many people around the world are understanding the vibrational aspect of living.

Abundance | Life | Life | Will |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The reason for desires, goals, for finding those decisions or points of focus, is because they are the life-giving things of the Universe. Without objects of attention, or objects of desire, Life-Force does not come through any of us.

Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

You cannot receive vibrationally something that you are not a vibrational match to. And so, bless those who are finding abundance. And in your blessing of them and their abundance, you will become abundant too.

Awareness | Death | Experience | Good | Joy | Life | Life | Plenty | Promise | Awareness | Value |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

If you will relax and allow Law of Attraction to do the organization, the managing, then you can spend your time doing the things that please you

Life | Life | Need |

Ethel Barrymore

Wrinkles should only indicate where smiles have been.

Life | Life | Position |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Through this intellect, every man is a person and through the same intellect he can see exactly the same truth as any other man can see, provided they both use their intellects in the proper way. Here, and nowhere else, lies the foundation for the very possibility of a philosophia perennis; for it is, not a perennial cloud floating through the ages in some metaphysical stratosphere, but the permanent possibility for each and every human being to actualize an essence through his own existence, that is to experience again the same truth in the light of his own intellect. And that truth itself is not an anonymous one. Even taken in its absolute and self-subsisting form, truth itself bears a name. Its name is God.

Error | Faith | God | Knowledge | Reason | God |

Eugen Drewermann

All the things you did until you turned forty confront you again after midlife as a task, but this time inwardly.

Life | Life |

Eugen Herrigel

You have described only too well, replied the Master, where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way--like the hand of a child.

Danger | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Time | Danger |

Eugene Peterson

We live in a society that is in slavery. Maybe not institutionalized, but slavery, nonetheless. Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence we live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts. –

Children | Faith | Feelings | God | Wife | God | Learn |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

Supposing I was to tell you that it's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on — in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon?

Gold | Race | Strength |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

Why canÂ’t you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. YouÂ’ll find what youÂ’re trying to say in him- as youÂ’ll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' 'Fine! ThatÂ’s beautiful. But I wasnÂ’t trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so letÂ’s drink up and forget it. ThatÂ’s more my idea.

Beauty | Earth | Life | Life | Love | Order | Beauty | Afraid |

Eudora Welty

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Life | Life |

Eugene Peterson

I wish him well. Now he can continue to pursue his dream of excellence in education.

Life | Life | Will |

Eugene Peterson

We take precautions by learning safety rules, fastening our seat belts and taking out insurance policies, but we cannot guarantee safety.

Faith | God | God | Stamina |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

For de small stealing dey puts you in jail, soon or late. But for de big stealing dey puts yo' picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croaks! If dey's one thing I learned in ten years, listenin' to de white quality on de Pullman cars, it's dat same fact. And when I gets a chance to use it -- from stowaway to Emperor in two years. Dat's goin' some!

Life | Life | Past | Peace | Unity |

Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won't let them face the truth. They don't want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking! No, they don't want to be free. Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not to think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!

Beauty | Joy | Life | Life | Unity | Beauty |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Not merely to learn philosophy, but to become a philosopher, this is what is now at stake. It does not involve giving up philosophy as a science; it rather involves aiming at possessing philosophy in a different and more exalted way as included in wisdom itself, to which it is in the same relation as a body to its soul. Then also does the philosophical life truly begin, and its beginning does not consist in any addition to already acquired learning; it rather looks like falling in love, like answering the call of a vocation, or undergoing the transforming experience of a conversion.

Life | Life | Man |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

So we must try to distinguish between two questions that are often confused in this discussion. Is the existence of God a truth demonstrable by natural reason, so that it is knowable and known with certitude? Without a doubt the answer to this first question is “yes.” The second question is whether everyone can consider his natural reason infallible in its effort to demonstrate rationally the existence of God? The merciless criticism of the proofs of St. Augustine, St. Anselm, Descartes, Malebranche and many others are timely reminders of the need for modesty. Are we keener philosophers than they? That is the whole question. Modesty is not skepticism. So we should not be afraid to let our mind pursue the proof of God’s existence until we reach the greatest possible certitude, but we should keep intact our faith in the word that reveals this truth to the most simple folk as well as to the most learned. Here it is well to meditate on the very complex and nuanced passage in ST 2-2.2.4: “Is it necessary to believe what can be proved by natural reason?” The answer is in the affirmative: “We must accept by faith not only what is above reason but also what can be known by reason.”

Beginning | Body | Experience | Giving | Life | Life | Looks | Philosophy | Wisdom | Learn |