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

Jacques Maritain

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence - even mental.

Absolute | Character | Doubt | Philosophy | Silence | Truth |

Francis Quarles

The height of all philosophy is to know thyself; and the end of this knowledge is to know God. Know thyself, that thou mayest know God; and know God, that thou mayest love him and be like him. In the one thou art initiated into wisdom; and in the other perfected in it.

Art | Character | God | Know thyself | Knowledge | Love | Philosophy | Wisdom | Art |

Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

Our philosophy determines the quality of our life.... how many times you go through those ups and downs you maintain your Divine changelessness.

Character | Life | Life | Philosophy |

Albert Schweitzer

Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.

Character | Life | Life | Philosophy | Religion | Respect | Respect |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

He only can attain to virtue who knows and imitates God - which knowledge and imitation are the only cause of blessedness... for philosophy is directed to the obtaining of the blessed life, and he who loves God is blessed in the enjoyment of God.

Blessedness | Cause | Enjoyment | God | Imitation | Knowledge | Life | Life | Philosophy | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | God | Blessed |

Annette Baier, née Stoop

A complete moral philosophy would tell us how and why we should act and feel towards others in relationships of shifting and varying power asymmetry and shifting and varying intimacy.

Philosophy | Power | Wisdom |

Victor Cousin

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

Nothing | Philosophy | Wisdom |

John Dewey

We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition.

Aspiration | Events | Force | Imagination | Intelligence | Life | Life | Meaning | Philosophy | Poetry | Practice | Revelation | Science | Will | Wisdom | Circumstance |

Albert Einstein

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

Logic | Mind | Philosophy | Reality | Wisdom |

James Ferrier, fully James Frederick Ferrier

Every question in philosophy is the mask of another question; and all these masking and masked questions require to be removed and laid aside, until the ultimate but truly first question has been reached. Then, but not till them, it is possible to decipher and resolve the outside mask, and all those below it, which come before us in the first instance.

Philosophy | Question | Wisdom |

George Washington Goethals

Knowledge of our duties is the most essential part of the philosophy of life. If you escape duty you avoid action. The world demands results.

Action | Duty | Knowledge | Life | Life | Philosophy | Wisdom | World |

A. C. Harwood

There is one type of feeling which is above all important to foster in childhood. Children have naturally an abundant faculty for wonder and reverence. There are so many books, so many radio and television hours, so many encyclopedias and, alas, so many teachers whose aim is to import knowledge quickly and easily without any element of that faculty which the Greeks said was the beginning of philosophy – Wonder. It is strange that an age which has discovered so many marvels in the universe should be so conspicuously lacking in the sense of wonder.

Age | Beginning | Books | Childhood | Children | Important | Knowledge | Philosophy | Reverence | Sense | Television | Universe | Wisdom | Wonder |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of "being and becoming"! That is the broad lesson of the evolution of the world... The belief in the freedom of the will is inconsistent with the truth of evolution. Modern philosophy shows clearly that the will is never really free in man or animal, but determined by the organization of the brain; and that in turn acquires its individual character by the laws of heredity and the influence of environment.

Belief | Change | Character | Evolution | Existence | Freedom | Heredity | Individual | Influence | Lesson | Man | Nothing | Organization | Philosophy | Truth | Will | Wisdom | World |

David Hume

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Philosophy | Religion | Wisdom |

William James

The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world formula or that world formula be the true one.

Life | Life | Philosophy | Will | Wisdom | World |