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

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Revolutionaries filling the world banging for the world to not sleep weighed on the bodies of the poor.

Better | Birth | Hope | Labor | Life | Life | Time | Will |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.

Life | Life |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

There is no such thing as the viability of states or of nations, there is only a problem of viability of people: people, actual persons like you and me, are viable when they can stand on their own feet and earn their keep. You do not make non-viable people viable by putting large numbers of them into one huge community, and you do not make viable people non-viable by splitting a large community into a number of smaller, more intimate, more coherent and more manageable groups.

Life | Life |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

To which the senses retort; 'Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.'

Life | Life | Sense |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.

Angels | Fear | Happy | Imagination | Life | Life | Magnanimity | Mockery | Nothing | Risk |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The essence of educationÂ…is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own, a part, so to say, of our mental make-up. This means that they are more than mere formulae or dogmatic assertions: that we think and feel with them, that they are the very instruments through which we look at, interpret, and experience the world.

Effort | Life | Life |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The marketÂ… represents only the surface of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into the natural or social facts that lie behind them. In a sense, the market is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.

Life | Life | Man | Neglect |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Comparative psychology teaches us to recognize a very long series of successive steps in the development of soul in the animal kingdom. But it is only in the most highly developed vertebrates-birds and mammals--that we discern the first beginnings of reason, the first traces of religious and ethical conduct. In them we find not only the social virtues common to all the higher socially-living animals,--neighborly love, friendship, fidelity, self-sacrifice, etc.,--but also consciousness, sense of duty, and conscience; in relation to man their lord, the same obedience, the same submissiveness, and the same craving for protection, which primitive man in his turn shows towards his "gods."

Life | Life | Nations | Nature | Organic |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.

Important | Life | Life | Order | Study |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Excellent! This is real life, full of antinomies and bigger than logic. Without order, planning, predictability, central control, accountancy, instructions to the underlings, obedience, discipline—without these, nothing fruitful can happen, because everything disintegrates. And yet—without the magnanimity of disorder, the happy abandon, the entrepreneurship venturing into the unknown and incalculable, without the risk and the gamble, the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread—without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.

Ends | Guidance | Need | People | Science | Wisdom | Work | Guidance | Value |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds.

Discipline | Force | Freedom | Life | Life | Power | Problems |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.

Life | Life | Strength |

Erving Goffman

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

Individual | Right | Will | Value |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Needless to say, wealth, education, research and many other things are needed for any civilization, but what is most needed today is a revision of the ends which these means are meant to serve.

Life | Life | Will |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science and technology was something which we could perhaps get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position.

Experience | Life | Life | Means | Think |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The first commandment for every good explorer is that an expedition has two points: the point of departure and the point of arrival. If your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don't think about the means -- because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of 'finishing.' That is to say, the means are endless.

Life | Life | Right |

Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

The natural advantages of the cultivation of sugar in Cuba are obvious, but the predominant fact is that Cuba was developed as a sugar factory of the United States.

Life | Life | Man | Property | Worth |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make doing each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself.

Knowledge | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Research | Science | Space |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

We may now give the following more precise expression to our chief law of biogeny:— The evolution of the foetus (or ontogenesis) is a condensed and abbreviated recapitulation of the evolution of the stem (orphylogenesis); and this recapitulation is the more complete in proportion as the original development (orpalingenesis) is preserved by a constant heredity; on the other hand, it becomes less complete in proportion as a varying adaptation to new conditions increases the disturbing factors in the development (or cenogenesis).

Life | Life | Mind | Value |