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

Ezriel Tauber

Eternity is the opposite of time. It is the experience where the barriers of creation and Creator are removed. And this is what the Torah tells us our choice is: time or eternity.

Choice | Eternity | Experience | Time | Torah |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

The highest wisdom has but one science - the science of the whole - the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.

Man | Science | Wisdom |

Fukuzawa Yukichi

One hundred volumes of international law are not the equal of a few cannons; a handful of treaties are not worth a basket of gunpowder. Cannon and gunpowder are not aids for the enforcement of given moral principles, they are implements for the creation of morality where none exists.

Law | Morality | Principles | Worth |

David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm

What is essential here is the presence of the spirit of dialogue, which is the ability to hold many points of view in suspension, along with a primary interest in the creation of common meaning.

Ability | Meaning | Spirit |

Philip Hauge Abelson

Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science.

Knowledge | Love | Science | Strength |

Andrew Bernstein

The hero is the man dedicated to the creation and / or defense of reality-conforming, life-promoting values.

Defense | Hero | Life | Life | Man | Reality |

Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren

When a man feels the pangs of loneliness, he is able to create. As soon as he reaches detachment, he ceases to create, for he loves no more. Every creation originates in love.

Detachment | Loneliness | Love | Man |

Albert Camus

Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Future |

Alice Walker, fully Alice Malsenior Walker

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

Universe |

Andrew Martin Fairbairn

All God’s works are silent. They are not done amid the rattle of drums and flare of trumpets. Light as it travels makes no noise, utters no sound to the ear. Creation is a silent process; nature rose under the Almighty hand without clang or clamor, or noises that distract and disturb.

God | Light | Nature | Noise | Sound |

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Know then that all true creation is not a prejudgment of the Future, not a quest of utopian chimeras, but the apprehending of a new aspect of the Present, which is a heap of raw materials bequeathed by the Past, and it is for you neither to grumble at it nor to rejoice over it, for, like yourself, all these things merely are, having come to birth.

Birth | Future | Past | Present |

Arthur W Osborn

Many have declared the ultimate truth openly: that only the self is, that you are nothing other than the Self, that the universe is a mere manifestation of the Self, without inherent reality, existing only in the Self. This can be understood by the analogy of a dream. The whole dream-world with all its people and events exist only in the mind of the dreamer. Its creation or emergence takes nothing away from him, and its dissolution or reabsorption adds nothing to him; he remains the same before, during, and after. God, the conscious Dreamer of the cosmic dream, is the Self, and no person in the dream has any reality apart from the Self of which he is an expression. By discarding the illusion of otherness, you can realize that identity with the Self which always was, is, and will be, beyond the conditions of life and time. Then, since you are One with the Dreamer, the whole universe, including your life and all others, is your dream and none of the events in it have more than a dream reality. You are set free from hope and desire, fear and frustration, and established in the unchanging Bliss of Pure Being.

Desire | Events | Fear | God | Hope | Illusion | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | People | Reality | Self | Time | Truth | Universe | Will | World |

Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

The greater the power that we have to change the World into something nearer to our ideal, the greater becomes our distress at our failing to perform those beneficent and useful acts of creation which we know to be within our power.

Change | Distress | Power | World |

Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Suffering is the essence of life, because it is the inevitable product of an unresolved tension between a living creature’s essential impulse to try to make itself into the centre of the Universe and its essential dependence on the rest of Creation and on the Absolute Reality.

Absolute | Dependence | Impulse | Inevitable | Life | Life | Reality | Rest | Suffering | Universe |

Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer

Unless we believe that God renews the work of creation every day, our prayers and obeying of the commandments grow old and accustomed, and tedious.

Day | God | Work | God | Old |

Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL

Any one in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to a humble and grateful mind.

Mind | Providence |

Francis Bacon

The first creation of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense; the last was the light of the reason: and His Sabbath-work ever since is the illumination of the spirit.

God | Light | Reason | Sabbath | Sense | Spirit | Work | God |