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

Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL

So through study of principles (tattvas) arises the ultimate, undistracted, pure knowledge that neither I am, nor is anything mine nor am I embodied.

Nature | Self | Intellect |

Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver

Our Creator never wasted his or her time creating a second-class person. He made us all first class and he provided this earth as our home for all of us, not for the black man, the white man, the red man, the yellow man, the brown man, but for the whole human family.

Rights |

Eliza Cook

How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start, when memory plays an old tune on the heart.

Courage | Devotion | Future | Guile | Intrigue | Life | Life | Man | Popularity | Principles | Public | Righteousness | Skill | Youth | Following | Youth | Intellect | Teacher |

Eleanor Holmes Norton

Disintegration of the family is the greatest problem facing the African-American community... And there are no simple, easy answers to this. Government has a role, but you have to be careful. How do you get into someone's family and try and save it; convince young men that they have responsibilities, young men who often feel they have no future and no hope.

William Shakespeare

Sir, he made a chimney in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it.

Intellect |

Elizabeth Gilbert

To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you make. It has very little thing to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

Enjoyment | Means | Rhetoric |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

If you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. And likewise, if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.

God | Soul | God |

Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch

This is the final test of the truth or untruth of a constructive or disintegrating philosophy of life. What increases man's sense of power, and therefore, for him, the content of life, is true. What tends to the diminishing of the store of moral resiliency and of the energy needed for resisting as well as for onward pushing is corrupting, and therefore marked by falsehood's taint.

Future | Instinct | Man | Need | Truth |

Emile Zola

As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting.

Eva Zeisel

We are actually concerned with the playful search for beauty.

Ernest Becker

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive

Capacity | Eternal | Individual | Lesson | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Men | Problems | Rank | Sense | Society | World | Society | Trouble |

Ernest Becker

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

Ernest Becker

And so, the question for the science of mental health must be­come an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that re­flects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.

Absolute | Anxiety | Anxiety | Cause | Confidence | Order | Parents | Power | Question | Security | Self | Society | Terror | Understanding | Weakness | Worth | Society | Child | Think |

Ernest Becker

Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.

Awareness | Comfort | Culture | Dedication | Evolution | Fury | Giving | Hope | Life | Life | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Society | Time | Society | Awareness | Understand |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code; so there are, as a rule, two copies of the latter in the fertilized egg cell, which forms the earliest stage of the future individual. In calling the structure of the chromosome fibres a code-script we mean that the all-penetrating mind, once conceived by Laplace, to which every causal connection lay immediately open, could tell from their structure whether the egg would develop, under suitable conditions, into a black cock or into a speckled hen, into a fly or a maize plant, a rhododendron, a beetle, a mouse or a woman. To which we may add, that the appearances of the egg cells are very often remarkably similar; and even when they are not, as in the case of the comparatively gigantic eggs of birds and reptiles, the difference is not so much in the relevant structures as in the nutritive material which in these cases is added for obvious reasons. But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power, or, to use another simile, they are architect's plan and builder's craft-in one.

Argument | Intellect |

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

It is not a question of choosing between "modern growth" and "traditional stagnation." It is a question of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobilityÂ…

Effort | Important |

Ernest Shurtleff Holmes

The road to freedom lies not through mysteries or occult performances, but through the intelligent use of natural forces and laws.

Thought | Will | Intellect | Thought |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Thus the same statement that guarantees that God exists and that his most suitable name is He Who Is, also reveals to us the perfect simplicity of the divine essence. And indeed, God did not say: I am this or that, but simply I Am. I am what? I am ‘I Am.’ So, more than ever, the statement of Exodus seems to soar above in a kind of empty space, where the attraction of the weight of philosophy can no longer be felt. The work of reason is good, healthy, and important, for it proves that, left to itself, philosophy can establish with certitude the existence of the primary being whom everyone calls God. But a single word of the sacred text at once puts us in personal relations with him. We say his name, and by the simple fact of saying it, it teaches us the simplicity of the divine essence.

Absolute | Experience | Light | Man | Truth | Intellect |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

He (a new philosopher) still needs to be taught, not this time philosophy, but to philosophize.

Day | Knowledge | Principles | Right | Time | Intellect |

Eugene Peterson

Our Lord gave us the image of a child, not because of the childÂ’s helplessness, but because of the childÂ’s willingness to be led, to be taught, to be blessed.

Books | Care | Children | Counsel | God | Good | Leisure | Little | Need | Practice | Rest | Work | Counsel | God |