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

Abraham Joshua Heschel

By negligence and silence we have all become accessory before the God of mercy to the injustice committed against the Negroes by men of our nation.

God | Injustice | Injustice | Men | Mercy | Silence | God |

Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal

Prayer is an expression of man’s inner yearning for a response in the awful silence of the universe. It is a unique process of discovery whereby the searching ego affirms itself in the very moment of self-negation, and thus discovers its own worth and justification as a dynamic factor in the life of the universe.

Discovery | Dynamic | Ego | Justification | Life | Life | Man | Prayer | Self | Silence | Unique | Universe | Worth | Discovery |

F. Malava

That soul is not idle which, holding itself in the presence of God, keeps interior silence… For the will to keep silence is an act of veneration.

God | Silence | Soul | Will |

Thomas Merton

My only task is to be what I am, a man seeking God in silence and solitude, with respect for the demands and realities of his own vocation, and fully aware that others too are seeking the truth in their own way.

God | Man | Respect | Silence | Solitude | Truth | Respect | God |

Thomas Merton

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Despair | Joy | Life | Life | Music | Phenomena | Reality | Sadness | Silence |

George Herbert Morrison

A love that has no silence has no depth. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” There are people whose love we instinctively distrust because they are always telling us about it. And perhaps it is simply because God is love, in all the glorious fullness of that word, that we have to be still if we would know him.

Distrust | God | Love | People | Protest | Silence | God |

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

To get at the transcendent within oneself, one must break through one’s normal self. We must impose silence on our familiar self, if the spirit of God is to become manifest in us. The divine is more deeply in us than we are ourselves.

God | Self | Silence | Spirit | God |

Francis Quarles

The voice of humility is God’s music and the silence of humility is God’s rhetoric.

God | Humility | Music | Rhetoric | Silence |

Haile Selassie

Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Better | Evil | History | Indifference | Justice | Silence |

Helmut Thielicke

What is it but blasphemy when God is merely my means to an end? That takes its toll. If we turn God into a puppet of our desires (even when that happens by the pious route of prayer) then he shuts up his heaven and we find ourselves thrown back into the silence of our unredeemed life.

Blasphemy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Means | Pious | Prayer | Silence | God |

Maitri Upanishad or Maitrayaniya Upanishad

Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the soul finds peace in its own source.

Peace | Silence | Soul |

Gerald Vann

If we are to be saved from our futility we must recover the faculty of being still: we must make an enclave of silence within our own souls.

Silence |

Aimé Fernand David Césaire

Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.

Knowledge | Silence |

George Barzan

If everybody thought before they spoke, the silence would be deafening.

Silence | Thought | Thought |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

All about me may be silence and darkness, yet within me, in the spirit, is music and brightness, and color flashes through all my thoughts.

Darkness | Music | Silence | Spirit |

Aeschylus NULL

I have found long since that silence is an antidote to harm.

Harm | Silence |