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 Grudin

For all the psychological and physiological conditions which test integrity - fear, desire, hunger, fatigue, disaffection, anger, pain - have little reality in memory or anticipation but rather exist for the most part in the narrow immediacy of the present.

Anger | Anticipation | Desire | Fear | Hunger | Integrity | Little | Memory | Pain | Present | Reality |

Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the highest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. “I keep the subject,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “constantly before me, and wait until the dawnings open by little and little into a full light.” It was thus that after long meditation he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, and that those views were suggested by Davy which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies.

Abstract | Age | Ambition | Anticipation | Attention | Contentment | Death | Discovery | Disease | Ennui | Failure | Genius | History | Indolence | Intelligence | Invention | Little | Meditation | Men | Mind | Object | Old age | Perfection | Power | Will | Discovery |

Socrates NULL

The soul when using the body as an instrument of perception - that is to say, when using the sense of sigh and hearing, or some other sense - for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses - is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal) and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change... But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.

Body | Change | Eternity | Meaning | Perception | Sense | Soul | World |

Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an

If you wish to move in the One Way do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas. Indeed, to accept them fully is identical with full Enlightenment. The wise man strives to no goals but the foolish man fetters himself. There is one Dharma [Truth, Universal Law, elements of existence], not many; distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant. To seek Mind with discriminating mind is the greatest of all mistakes.

Enlightenment | Existence | Goals | Ideas | Law | Man | Mind | Truth | Wise | World |

William Law

Though God is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. the natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of his habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of the tree. This depth is the unity, the eternity - I had almost said the infinity - of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the infinity of God.

Body | Eternity | God | Memory | Nothing | Present | Rest | Soul | Understanding | Unity | Will | God |

Yoshida Kenko

If life were eternal all interest and anticipation would vanish. It is uncertainty which lends its fascination.

Anticipation | Eternal | Life | Life | Uncertainty |

Deepak Chopra

Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.

Anticipation | Fear | Thinking |

John Grier Hibben

Let us examine more closely the significance of this vague word, reality. It may have several meanings, according to the different points of view which one takes. We may regard it as embodied in the physical world, the world of land and sea, of sky and trees, of sunshine and of storm. The real therefore will be to us that which we can touch and see, smell and taste, as one will say, "I know that is real for I can see it with my eyes." Seeing is believing, and the testimony of the senses is the superior court of appeal in controverted questions. But the world of reality may be regarded from quite a different point of view, as the world of consciousness, the mind of man, the experiences of the inner self, the Ego. Here is a world of phenomena interrelated and reciprocally dependent. It is a realm of ideas, of memory images, of fancy, of will, and of desire. The verities in this world cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, and yet we do not hesitate to speak of them as realities; they are real as the love of friends is real, or the anger of a foe. The passion of a Romeo, the will of a Napoleon, the genius of a Goethe ... these are realities.

Anger | Consciousness | Desire | Ego | Genius | Ideas | Land | Love | Man | Memory | Mind | Passion | Phenomena | Reality | Regard | Self | Taste | Will | World | Friends |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts — but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.

Alienation | Consequences | Experience | Time | World |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

The observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. And it might be better to reserve the term "subject" for the observing mind. ... For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy."

Better | Mind | Reserve |

Francis Bacon

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

Axioms | Discovery | Judgment | Truth | Discovery |

Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

Reason |

Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

Light | Man |

Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg

First, of all do not deny your teenager's perception. Do not argue with his experience. Do not disown his feelings. Specifically, do not try to convince him that what he sees or hears or feels or senses is not so.

Henry Beston, born Henry Beston Sheahan

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Life | Life | Mystical | Need | World |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Huang Po, also Huángbò Xīyùn

The enlightened ones are neither attached to nor detached from their senses and thoughts.

John-Pierre de Cassaude

In the shadow of death he produces life, and though the senses are terrified, faith taking all for the best, is full of courage and assurance.

Courage | Death | Faith |

Jean Houston

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

Meaning | Sense |

Jeremy Taylor

Conscience in most men, is but the anticipation of the opinions of others.

Anticipation |