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

George Brantl

Man is ever a contingent being in search of necessity.

Man | Necessity | Search |

Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – acquired significant power to alter nature of his world.

Earth | History | Life | Life | Nature | Power | Present | Time | World |

Phillips Brooks

Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God’s paradise.

Earth | God | Life | Life | Man | Paradise |

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence.

Earth | Faith | Good | Government | Heaven | Influence | Justice | Light | Order | Peace | Truth | Blessed |

J. B. Bury, fully John Bagnell Bury

If there were a good cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2100 the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically disappear.

Cause | Doctrine | Earth | Good | Meaning | Progress |

Albert Einstein

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore.

Earth | Knowing |

L. Francis Edmunds

According to the laws of probability, the time it would take to produce a single molecule of a moderate degree of dissymmetry on a globe the size of the earth would be about 10243 Billions of years, whereas by the most recent calculations, based on radioactivity, the earth is estimate to have been in existence for only 2 billion years… the properties of a cell are born out of the co-ordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous co-ordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Chance | Earth | Existence | Size | Time |

Sheila Collins

We were never promised a life free from fear and struggle. We were offered the hope that by committing ourselves to the struggle for a righteous society in solidarity with the wretched of the earth we would discover the secret of life.

Earth | Fear | Hope | Life | Life | Society | Struggle | Society |

L. Francis Edmunds

The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists.

Existence | Experience | God | Individual | Personality | Reality | Search | Truth |

L. Francis Edmunds

What is important and of greatest significance is that an ideal of final truth is always before use and that the search for truth is acknowledged by all men as a duty not imposed from outside but born from within. The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists.

Duty | Existence | Experience | God | Important | Individual | Men | Personality | Reality | Search | Truth |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair.

Earth | Organic | Rule |

Mourning Dove or Christal Quintasket, aka Mourning Dove Salish and Christine Quintasket NULL

Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence.

Disease | Earth | Existence | Mission | Purpose | Purpose |

Crazy Horse, formally Tashunca Uitco NULL

One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.

Earth | People |

W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

Desire | Earth | Life | Life | Materialism |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

Truth is like a vast tree which yields more and more fruit, the more you nurture it. The deeper the search in the mine of Truth, the richer the discovery of the gems buried there in the shape of opening for an ever greater variety of service.

Discovery | Search | Service | Truth | Discovery |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel people to unfold their powers.

Meaning | People | Search | Uncertainty |