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

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Relationship means contact, communion. There cannot be communion where people are divided by ideas. A belief may gather a group of people around itself. Such a group will inevitably breed opposition and so form another group with a different belief. Ideas postpone direct relationship with the problem.

Belief | Character | Ideas | Means | Opposition | People | Relationship | Will |

Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

Adventure | Change | Character | Daring | Fate | Life | Life | Nothing | Strength | Fate |

B. C. Kher

Both the saint and the scientist must possess the same qualities in order to attain their ideals. But these qualities are selfless devotion, a meticulous love of truth, infinite patience, thoroughness, and a depth of mind which does not resent criticism. Without these qualities neither of the two can reach his goal. It is my firm belief that the goal which both science and religion reach by different routes is one and the same.

Belief | Character | Criticism | Devotion | Ideals | Love | Mind | Order | Patience | Qualities | Religion | Science | Truth |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

Behavior | Change | Character | Heart | Morality |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

To most of us, relationship is a term for comfort, for gratification, for security, and in that relationship we use property, ideas, and persons for our gratification. We use belief as a means of security.

Belief | Character | Comfort | Ideas | Means | Property | Relationship | Security |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

This spectacle of old age would be unendurable if we did not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death is a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.

Age | Birth | Change | Character | Death | Old age | Time | Wisdom | Old |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

What is important is to free ourselves from ideas, from nationalism, from all religious beliefs and dogmas, so that we can act, not according to a pattern or an ideology, but as needs demand... It is only when the mind is free of idea and belief that it can act rightly... and freedom from ideas can take place only through self-awareness and self-knowledge.

Awareness | Belief | Character | Freedom | Ideas | Important | Knowledge | Mind | Self | Self-awareness | Self-knowledge | Wisdom |

Gloria D. Karpinski

Self-knowledge is the primary step in conscious evolutionary change. When people confront and integrate their individual fears and limitations, they facilitate the confrontation and integration of our racial, national, and planetary fears. Lasting social change is only possible when individual consciousness has first been changed.

Change | Character | Consciousness | Individual | Integration | Knowledge | People | Self | Self-knowledge |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.

Better | Change | Character |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Reality comes into being only when the mind is still, not made still. Therefore, there must be no disciplining of the mind to be still. When you discipline yourself, it is merely a projected desire to be in a particular state. Such a state is not the state of passivity... Liberation is from moment to moment in the understanding of what is, when the mind is free, not made free. It is only a free mind that can discover, not a mind molded by a belief or shaped according to a hypothesis. Such a mind cannot discover. There can be no freedom is there is conflict, for conflict is the fixing of the self in relationship.

Belief | Character | Desire | Discipline | Freedom | Hypothesis | Mind | Reality | Relationship | Self | Understanding |

L. W. Lynett

The most effective way to cope with change is to help create it.

Change | Character |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

All belief that does not render us more happy, more free, more loving, more active, more calm, is, I fear, an erroneous and superstitious belief.

Belief | Character | Fear | Happy |

James Russell Lowell

The foolish and dead alone never change their opinions.

Change | Character |

Walter Savage Landor

It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires.

Belief | Character | Wise |

Walter Lippmann

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.

Belief | Character | Error | Justify | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Order | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

With most people, doubt about one thing is simply blind belief in another.

Belief | Character | Doubt | People |