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

Juan Ramón Jimenez, fully Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

Character | Desire | Haste | Life | Life | Means | Right | Time |

William James

There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors... Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways... Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Character | Education | Genius | Ideas | Little | Means | Mind | Struggle | Truth | Old |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

God may be worshipped and contemplated in any of his aspects. But to persist in worshipping only one aspect to the exclusion of all the rest is to run into grave spiritual peril... The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness... The complete transformation of consciousness, which is “enlightenment,” “deliverance,” “salvation,” comes only when God is thought of as the perennial Philosophy affirms Him to be - immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal - and when religious practices are adapted to this conception.

Character | Conduct | Consciousness | Enlightenment | God | Grave | Little | Nothing | Peril | Philosophy | Rest | Salvation | Thought | God | Thought |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked.

Character | Conduct | God | Indispensable | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Virtue | Virtue | God |

William James

Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse.

Absence | Character | Faith | Means | Men |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

It’s quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards. But one then forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forwards. A principle which, the more one thinks it through, precisely leads to the conclusion that life in time can never properly be understood, just because no moment can acquire the complete stillness needed to orient oneself backwards.

Character | Life | Life | Philosophy | Time |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

I have often seen individuals who simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’, revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through the widening of his view, the insoluble problem, lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out in contrast to a new and strong life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so became different itself. What, on a lower level, had led the wildest conflicts and emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality; it means that instead of being in it, one is now above it.

Character | Consciousness | Contrast | Emotions | Experience | Life | Life | Light | Means | Panic | Personality | Reality |

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 |

Sherman E. Johnson

A man who protects and hoards his life may lose it anyhow. Perhaps to protect it is to lose it in the most real sense of the word, for cowardice means spiritual death.

Character | Cowardice | Death | Life | Life | Man | Means | Sense |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Relationship means to respond. The root meaning of that word, not what we have made of that word, is to respond completely to another, like responsibility. Do we ever respond totally with each other, or it is always a fragmentary response, a partial response?

Character | Meaning | Means | Relationship | Responsibility |

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 |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

Character | Means | Meditation | Wisdom |

Eric Allen Johnston

The things a man believes most profoundly are rarely on the surface of his mind or tongue. Newly acquired notions - decisions based on expediency, the fashionable ideas of the moment - are right on top of the pile, ready to be displayed in bright after-dinner conversation. But the ideas that make up a man's philosophy of life are somewhere way down below.

Character | Conversation | Ideas | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Philosophy | Right |

Gloria D. Karpinski

Nonresistance isn’t passive. Passivity suggests powerlessness. But non-resistance is extremely powerful. It means we’re consciously choosing what we wish to empower. Nonresistance is the action of wisdom that assesses a situation and realizes there is nothing to be gained from fighting it.

Action | Character | Fighting | Means | Nothing | Wisdom |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

The best thing about philosophy is that it fails. It is better that philosophy fail to totalize meaning for it thereby remains open to the irreducible otherness of transcendence.

Better | Character | Meaning | Philosophy |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

True philosophy is that which makes us to ourselves and to all about us, better; and at the same time, more content, patient, calm, and more ready for all decent and pure enjoyment.

Better | Character | Enjoyment | Philosophy | Time |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I and myself. I feel myself - these are two distinct things. Our false philosophy is incorporated in our whole language; we cannot reason without, so to speak, reasoning wrongly. We overlook the fact that speaking, no matter of what, is itself a philosophy.

Character | Language | Philosophy | Reason |