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

Charles Williams

The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.

Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |

Carol Adrienne

Let’s imagine a visual image of your “life” as an energetic field. This energetic field attracts to you people, opportunities, and events. Within that field is a central point of purpose around which incoming energy is organized. Affecting and modifying that central point of purpose are energetic sub-fields of beliefs, attitudes, past experiences, expectations, unresolved emotional states, and other unconscious material. At all times, we emit a certain energy pattern based on our physical, emotional and spiritual states. The model of a magnetic force field is intended to suggest that we not only radiate our energy from a centralized self-organizing, indwelling purpose, but that energetic field also attracts in, or magnetizes to itself, those people and things that will help fulfill that purpose.

Energy | Events | Force | Life | Life | Model | Past | People | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Will |

Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

The meaning of life is to be found in the living of it, and even for the individual a considerable range of possibilities and an unending flow of reflections upon your life constitutes part of that meaning. Play has no ultimate goal, no serious goal that will bring it to an end, but rather renews itself in constant repetition, with no repetition being an exact repeat of a prior instance. Living has a series of goals and is serious as well as playful, and yet the goals are always in transformation, or at least always in doubt. Circumstances are often similar, but it is not easy to specify exactness in your lived experience, even with someone with whom you have lived most of your life.

Circumstances | Doubt | Experience | Goals | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Will |

Tom Butler-Bowdon

Clarity about goals saves a huge amount of energy that can be productively in other areas.

Energy | Goals |

Tom Butler-Bowdon

Measuring your life daily against written goals is a fundamental of success. Fewer than 3 percent of people have written goals, and fewer than 1 percent regularly review them.

Goals | Life | Life | People | Success |

Gregg Braden

Emotion may be considered the source of power that drives us forward toward our goals in life. It is through the energy of our emotions that we fuel our thought to make them real. It is in the presence of thought that our emotion is given direction, breathing life into the image of our thoughts

Emotions | Energy | Goals | Life | Life | Power | Thought | Thought |

James W. Douglass

Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and [as yet] undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?

Atomic bomb | Change | Energy | History | Law | Reality | Society | World | Society |

Albert Einstein

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem – in my opinion – to characterize our age.

Age | Goals | Means | Opinion | Perfection |

Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz

There is nothing more common than to hear of men losing their energy on being raised to a higher position, to which they do not feel themselves equal.

Energy | Men | Nothing | Position |

Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Energy |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.

Energy | Freedom | Reform | Will |

Leonard Felder

The process of forgiveness allows you to turn your heart toward healing, release, and compassion instead of using your energy for revenge or punishment. Forgiveness allows you to build something positive in the present while still making sure not to repeat what happened in the past.

Compassion | Energy | Forgiveness | Heart | Past | Present | Punishment | Revenge | Forgiveness |

Leonard Felder

A passionate translation of the Sh’ma: Sh’ma: listen, or wake up. Yisroel: you who seek to understand and connect with God. Adonai: the Eternal One who has been present since the beginning of time and who expresses love and wisdom by entering our hearts and our world as Eloheynu: our God. Adonai Ekhad: this Eternal energy is the unity within and between all things.

Beginning | Energy | Eternal | God | Love | Present | Time | Unity | Wisdom | World | Understand |

Sidney Greenberg

A waste far more worthy of our tears is the enormous energy within us that never gets channeled, the love that is never expressed, the kindness that never surfaces, the compassion and tenderness that are never awakened.

Compassion | Energy | Kindness | Love | Tears | Tenderness | Waste |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

It is as if a divine cunning operated in human history, using our instincts as pretexts for the attainment of goals which are universally valid, a scheme to harness man’s lower forces in the service of higher ends.

Attainment | Cunning | Ends | Goals | History | Man | Service |

Os Guiness

When it is said and done, life’s journey isn’t about humanity in general, or even the person next door. It’s about you and me. Our individual lives are the focus, a picture framed by our birth and death. Our personal goals and principles are under scrutiny; our personal success or failure is in the balance.

Balance | Birth | Death | Failure | Focus | Goals | Humanity | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Principles | Success | Failure |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

Spiritual goals tend to become increasingly important and integrity becomes the yardstick of happiness. This leads to the evolution of consciousness in which the ultimate goal becomes the perfection of one’s relationship with God.

Consciousness | Evolution | Goals | God | Important | Integrity | Perfection | Relationship |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

In spiritual work, there is no tangible worldly gain to be acquired, but there is instead an inner reward of pleasure, satisfaction, and even joy. Goals replace gains as motives. There is a greater freedom from living on the exciting knife edge of the moment than being a prisoner of the past or having expectations of the future.

Freedom | Future | Goals | Joy | Motives | Past | Pleasure | Reward | Work |

Allan J Hamilton

Could the mind have an existence entirely independent of the central nervous system?... Scientific evidence that not only was her brain not working, it specifically demonstrated the absence of all cortical activity when these conversations actually took place. So where could these brand-new memories have been created?... Imagine the implications of the notion that quanta of conscious energy could exist independently in the Universe, able to enter from anywhere, at any time.

Absence | Energy | Evidence | Existence | Mind | System | Time | Universe |