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

Maurice Nicoll

We live in a narrow reality, partly conditioned by our form of perception and partly made by opinions that we have borrowed, to which our self-esteem is fastened. We fight for our opinions, not because we believe them but because they involve the ordinary feeling of oneself. Though we are continually being hurt owing to the narrowness of the reality in which we dwell, we blame life, and do not see the necessity of finding absolutely new standpoints. All ideas that have a transforming power change our sense of reality.

Blame | Change | Character | Esteem | Ideas | Life | Life | Necessity | Perception | Power | Reality | Self | Self-esteem | Sense |

Tatjana Patitz

I believe that being true to the self is the most important thing in life - to have a free heart, a pure soul and a pure mind. We all live, or should live, for the fulfillment of the self. We are all mirror images of each other; whatever we feel in ourselves we feel in others. I believe that we create our own lives... Intuition should play the main role in everything we do. Through the creative source of the mind and the unlimited power of the spirit all our deepest wishes come true. For me the meaning is that we are all one, and the only true reality is the spirit. Believing in the power of spirit is simply to have a passion for life, to learn, to grow, to evolve and most of all to love, and live each day and each moment of the day to the fullest.

Character | Day | Fulfillment | Heart | Important | Intuition | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Passion | Play | Power | Reality | Self | Soul | Spirit | Wishes |

Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, aka Beis Halevi

Anyone who runs after worldly pleasures is running after something that does not really exist. The reality is that the pleasure he seeks will not be found in the matter he desires.

Character | Pleasure | Reality | Will |

Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

To will and not to do when there is opportunity, is in reality not to will; and to love what is good and not to do it, when it is possible, is in reality not to love it.

Character | Good | Love | Opportunity | Reality | Will |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Wisdom is of the soul, it is not susceptible of proof, it is its own proof, applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; something there is in the flot of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Character | Excellence | Immortality | Qualities | Reality | Soul | Wisdom | Excellence |

Simone Weil

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Character | Reality | Wisdom |

Lionel Trilling

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable, in many respects seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their differences and specialness.

Ability | Character | People | Reality |

Bernice Abbott

Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the everchanging and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself!

Life | Life | People | Reality | Wisdom |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

In that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass; and this section is precisely that which we call the material world. Our bodies occupies its centre; it is, in this material world, that part of which we directly feel the flux; in its actual state the actuality of our present lies.

Perception | Present | Reality | Wisdom | World |

Bruno Bettelheim

Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communication coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones they see on the screen, and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The “TV child”... gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him.... If, later in life, this block of solid inertia is not removed, the emotional isolation from others that starts in front of TV may continue... This being seduced into passivity and discouraged about facing life actively on one’ sown is the real danger of TV.

Ability | Children | Danger | Day | Isolation | Life | Life | Meaning | Personality | Reality | Wisdom | Danger | Inertia | Learn |

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

Reality | Spirit | Wisdom |

Sarah Cirese

Knowing the reality and certainty of death reminds us that we do not have time to be casual or thoughtless with our lives. We only have time to live.

Death | Knowing | Reality | Time | Wisdom |

Jean Cocteau

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

Fable | History | Reality | Truth | Wisdom |

William Benton Clulow

Naked reality would scarcely keep the world in motion.

Reality | Wisdom | World |