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

Thomas Berry

Firstly, the primary status of the universe. The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’. The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.’

Achievement | Addiction | Consequences | Control | Difficulty | Energy | Global | Individual | Order | Society | Society |

Thich Nhất Hanh

Nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity.

Consequences |

Thomas Hobbes

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion

Action | Beginning | Consequences | Enough | Events | Life | Life | Man | Pleasure | Providence | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe, education is to be the chief instrument in effecting it.

Children | Consequences | Cost | Future | Good | Ignorance | Life | Life | Will |

Thomas Jefferson

Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments, wherein the will of every one has a just influence; as is the case in Enngland, in a slight degree, and in our States, in a great one. 3. Under governments of force; as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existance under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep….The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that, enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too; the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Malo periculosum libertatum quam quietum servitutum. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, with have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Consequences | Duty |

Thomas Paine

It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.

Consequences | Defeat | Enemy | Will |

Tim McGraw, fully Samuel Timothy "Tim" McGraw

People always ask me "Son what does it take To reach out and touch your dreams?" To them I always say Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Is it a fire that burns you up inside? How bad do you want it? How bad do you need it? Are you eating, sleeping, dreaming With that one thing on your mind? How bad do you want it? How bad do you need it? Cause if you want it all You've got to lay it all out on the line.

Care | Consequences | Desire |

W. Ian Thomas, fully Walter Ian Thomas

Make sure it is God's trumpet you are blowing- if it is only yours it won't wake the dead, it will simply disturb the neighbours.

Capacity | Consequences | Life | Life | Little | Understand |

William Carleton

In conclusion, I have endeavored, with what success has been already determined by the voice of my own country, to give a panorama of Irish life among the people … and in doing this, I can say with solemn truth that I painted them honestly and without reference to the existence of any particular creed or party.

Adventure | Appetite | Battle | Beauty | Consciousness | Consequences | Father | Fighting | Friend | Influence | Love | Man | Means | Mirth | Nothing | Sense | Silence | Spirit | Vengeance | Will | Woe | Beauty | Friends |

William Blake

The pure soul shall mount on native wings . . . and cut a path into the heaven of glory.

Cause | Consequences | God | Indignation | God | Think |

William Blake

What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp dare its deadly terrors clasp?

Consequences | Eternal |

Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.

Consequences | Good | Mind | Mother | Nature | Persuasion | Will |

Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

This has also appeared in the alternate form: What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Consequences | Knowledge | Nothing | System | Theoretical |

Wilhelm Röepke

It is a poor species of human being which this grim vision conjures up before our eyes: 'fragmentary and disintegrated' man, the end product of growing mechanization, specialization, and functionalization, which decompose the unity of human personality and dissolve it in the mass, an aborted form of Homo sapiens created by a largely technical civilization, a race of spiritual and moral pygmies lending itself willingly--indeed gladly, because that way lies redemption--to use as raw material for the modern collectivist and totalitarian mass state.

Consequences | Consideration | Sacrifice | Sense | Society | Will | Society |

Wilhelm Reich

Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual’s capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.

Civilization | Consequences | Man |

Walter Savage Landor

Twenty years hence my eyes may grow if not quite dim, yet rather so, still yours from others they shall know twenty years hence. Twenty years hence though it may hap that I be called to take a nap in a cool cell where thunderclap was never heard. there breathe but o'er my arch of grass a not too sadly sighed alas, and I shall catch, ere you can pass, that winged word.

Consequences |

Walter Lippmann

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

Consequences | Events | Government | Men | Public | Thought | Will | Government | Crisis | Thought |

Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

Each person on this planet is inherently, intrinsically capable of attaining dizzying heights of happiness and fulfillment.

Consequences | Opinion | Wants | Will |

Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

Humility, metaphysically, implies the absence of any entity to be either 'proud' or 'humble'.

Attainment | Consequences |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

Birth is an initiation into the ability to carry pain. We resist pain, but it has a transcendental nature.

Consequences | Learn |