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

Matthew B Ridgway, fully Matthew Bunker Ridgway

In setting our military goals we need first of all to recognize that most of the world’s most basic woes do not lend themselves to purely military solutions.

Goals | Need | Wisdom | World |

Publius Syrus

We should provide in peace what we need in war.

Need | Peace | War | Wisdom |

Theodore Roethke

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

Need | People | Wisdom |

Beverly Rubik

[Paraphrase from “Brain and Mind” article] “Local” healing reflects information from subtle bioenergy fields. By contrast, healing that appears non-local in space and time may be mediated by “information associated with conscious intention”... In electromagnetic healing... the living human organism contains many highly sensitive natural oscillators that join to form a collective “biofield.” This field is “a collective property of the organism and cannot be reduced to biomolecular events.” In this case, information is transmitted by external fields of similar frequency, with healing occurring through a “tuning” effect... “Information is about relationship and exists only in relationship.” Therefore, information grounded in love - “the highest-quality relationship” - may produce healing by overcoming information originated from the more mechanical levels of physical organization... “For science and medicine to embrace life’s full capacity and the full human potential we need to go beyond mechanical concepts that were developed for machines.”

Capacity | Contrast | Events | Intention | Life | Life | Love | Machines | Mind | Need | Organization | Property | Relationship | Science | Space | Time | Wisdom |

Albert Schweitzer

My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine... Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also.

Ethics | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Need | Respect | Will | Wisdom | World | Respect |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To endure is the first thing a child ought to learn, and that which he will have most need to know.

Need | Will | Wisdom | Child |

Gladys Bagg Taber

A time of quietude brings things into proportion and gives us strength. We all need to take time from the busyness of living, even it be only 10 minutes to watch the sun go down or the city lights blossom against a canyoned sky. We need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach toward the infinite. Time to be.

Need | Strength | Time | Wisdom |

Sydney Smith

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.

Man | Prejudice | Reason | Wisdom |

Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich

Art postulates communion, and the other artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.

Art | Joy | Need | Wisdom |

Simone Weil

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.

Eternity | Light | Need | Poetry | Religion | Wisdom |

Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

Today the conservation movement finds itself turning back to ancient Indian land ideas, to the Indian understanding that we are not outside of nature, but of it... In recent decades we have slowly come back to some of the truths that the Indian knew from the beginning; that unborn generations have a claim on the land equal to our own; that men need to keep an ear to the earth, and to replenish their spirits in frequent contacts with animals and wild land.

Beginning | Conservation | Earth | Ideas | Land | Men | Nature | Need | Understanding | Wisdom | Truths |

Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

Forms become more necessary as the government becomes more active and powerful, and private persons become more indolent and feeble. By their nature, democratic nations stand more in need of forms than other nations, and respect them less.

Government | Nations | Nature | Need | Respect | Wisdom | Government | Respect |

Simone Weil

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Important | Need | Soul | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

Perception is based, to a very large extent, on conceptual models - which are always inadequate, often incomplete and sometimes profoundly wrong. This complex situation arose because signals from the environment itself can be inadequate. The sort of information we need is not always available. And so, knowledge from the past, mixed up with assumptions about that knowledge which may be more or less appropriate, are used to augment information provided by the senses. Which means that our perception of any situation depends only partly on sensory signals being received at that time. And it is only a very short step from there, to perception which occurs in the absence of all immediate signals and has to be labeled “extrasensory”.

Absence | Knowledge | Means | Need | Past | Perception | Time | Wisdom | Wrong |

Julian Baggini

We need to find a form of life that is valuable in itself. What can make a life meaningful? Candidates for this role need to be worthwhile in themselves and not just means to future ends. They need to treat each human life as an autonomous being-for-itself, not merely a being-in-itself to serve some cause beyond it. They need to satisfy our aesthetic and ethical needs, as being both tied to the present moment and existing across time. And there is no reason why such meaning should not be found in this life and not only in a supposed life to come.

Aesthetic | Cause | Ends | Future | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Need | Present | Reason | Time |

T. H. Bindley, fully Thomas Herbert Bindley

We need to find out, not a formula, but a temper - not a creed, but a Faith - which is common to all, and which underlies all, and supports all, and inspires all.

Creed | Faith | Need | Temper |