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

Franco Zeffirelli

Saint Francis says the key to the purpose of life is giving. In giving, you find happiness. You find peace. If you give, you find you are serving your purpose in life. In loving, you find love.

Character | Giving | Life | Life | Love | Peace | Purpose | Purpose |

Freddy Arevalo, aka Don Valerio Cohaila

I am a particle of this organism called the earth... Life is because life must be... Life and death are cosmic breath... Each person designs his own destiny... The purpose of life is to continue developing consciousness.

Consciousness | Death | Destiny | Earth | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Yamada Koun Zenshin, or Koun Yamada or Yamada Roshi

The purpose of Zen is the perfection of character.

Character | Perfection | Purpose | Purpose | Zen |

Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

The lack of awareness of sense and purpose has led culture to become increasingly shallow.

Awareness | Character | Culture | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Wisdom | Awareness |

Simone Weil

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

Character | Life | Life | Order | People | Suffering |

John Stuart Blakie

Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.

Existence | Law | Order | Time | Truth | Wisdom |

Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

Heaven | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Wisdom |

Cecil Beaton, fully Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Daring | Integrity | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Vision | Will | Wisdom |

Leo Baeck

The purpose of prayer is to leave us alone with God.

God | Prayer | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne

Governments which suppress freedom of speech... act like children who shut their eyes in order not to be seen.

Children | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Order | Speech | Wisdom |

Milo Bail

The central purpose of American education is to prepare man to think and the major challenge facing us today is to keep man thinking.

Challenge | Education | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Thinking | Wisdom | Think |

Lyman Bryson

Education is anything that we do for the purpose of taking advantage of the experience of some one else.

Education | Experience | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.

Knowledge | Purpose | Purpose | Reading | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade

Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.

Law | Nature | Order | Play | Sense | Wisdom |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

Man | Order | Wealth | Wisdom | Worship |

Pablo Casals, fully Pau Casals i Defilló

The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one proposes to do.

Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

Thomas Buxton, fully Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet

The longer I live, the more I am certain that the difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, between the great and the insignificant, is energy - invincible determination - a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory.

Death | Determination | Energy | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |

James Burgh

Before you think of retiring from the world, be sure you are fit for retirement; in order to which it is necessary that you have a mind so composed by prudence, reason, and religion, that it may bear being looked into; a turn to rural life, and a love of study.

Life | Life | Love | Mind | Order | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Religion | Retirement | Study | Wisdom | World | Think |