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

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.

Defects | Imperfection | Life | Life | Light | Perfection | Progress | Suffering | Wholeness | Wisdom |

William James

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help you create the fact.

Belief | Life | Life | Will | Wisdom | Worth |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense- he is "collective man" - one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.

Aims | Art | Ends | Free will | Man | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Will | Wisdom | Art |

Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

Old disease patterns keep replicating themselves when the old thought patterns stay the same. All healing techniques serve to bring about a change in consciousness, which means a new expectancy of wholeness. What you expect at the deepest level is what you get. Your body loves to hear the truth about itself. Your body cannot help but respond to an awareness of and an expectancy of wholeness.

Awareness | Body | Change | Consciousness | Disease | Means | Thought | Truth | Wholeness | Wisdom | Awareness | Old | Thought |

Charles Kingsley

Make a rule, and pray to God to help you to keep it, never, if possible, to lie down at night without being able to say: "I have made one human being at least a little wiser, or a little happier, or at least a little better this day."

Beauty | Better | Glory | God | Little | Man | Music | Sacred | Wisdom | God |

Walter W. Van Kirk

I will do more than live and let live - I will live and help live.

Will | Wisdom |

John Locke

It is an established opinion among some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, stamped, as it were, upon the mind of man which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show how many men obtain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any such innate impressions... Let us suppose the mind to be a blank tablet; how comes it to be furnished? To this answer in one word, from experience.

Experience | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Opinion | Principles | Soul | Understanding | Wisdom | World |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

Wisdom |

John Neal

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against and not with the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm. Let no man wax pale, therefore, because of opposition.

Better | Man | Opposition | Wisdom |

Maurice Nicoll

If we start with the visible, then in order to explain it we must pass into its parts. If we seek to explain man by his organs, his organs by the cells composing them, the atoms by electrons, we lose sight of the man as a whole. Under the microscope the man himself completely disappears... The idea behind organised matter is overlooked. That which is manifest in time and space engages its attention, and so it cannot help looking for causal origin in the smaller constituent parts of any organism - and also in preceding time, i.e. in the past.

Attention | Man | Order | Past | Space | Time | Wisdom |

Johann Pestalozzi, fully Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

I learned that no man in God’s wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.

Earth | God | Man | Wisdom |

Kathleen Norris

There is a divinity that shapes our ends - but we can help by listening for Its voice.

Divinity | Ends | Listening | Wisdom |

Theodore Parker

The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading. But a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep-freighted with truth and with beauty.

Beauty | Books | Learning | Reading | Thought | Truth | Wisdom | Think |

Joseph Parker

The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty.

Beauty | Books | Learning | Reading | Thought | Truth | Wisdom | Think |

Bons (Leonidovich) Pasternak

Can a man control his future? Yes. Despite the system they live under, men everywhere have, I believe, more power over the future than ever before. The important thing is that we must choose to exercise it. What we do today determines how the world shall go, for tomorrow is made up of the sum total of today's experiences... Far from feeling hopeless or helpless, we must seize every opportunity, however small, to help the world around us toward peace, productivity and human brotherhood.

Brotherhood | Control | Future | Important | Man | Men | Opportunity | Peace | Power | System | Tomorrow | Wisdom | World |

William Penn

Inquiry is human; blind obedience brutal. Truth never loses by the one but often suffers by the other... O God, help us not to despise or oppose what we do not understand.

Despise | God | Inquiry | Obedience | Truth | Wisdom |

Henry Habberley "H.H." Price

Where we consider the world around us, we cannot help noticing that there is a great deal of recurrence or repetition in it. The same colour recurs over and over again in ever so many things. Shapes repeat themselves likewise.

Wisdom | World |

Antoine de Rivarol, also known as Comte de Rivarol

The methods that help a man acquire a fortune are the very ones that keep him from enjoying it.

Fortune | Man | Wisdom |