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

Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

The law will argue anything, with anybody who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time.

Mystery |

Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather

Antonia came in and stood before me... It was a shock, of course. It always is, to meet people after long years, especially if they have lived as much and as hard as this woman had. We stood looking at each other. The eyes that peered anxiously at me were - simply Antonia's eyes… As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there in the full vigor of her personality, battered, but not diminished.

Individual | Men | Mystery |

Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!

Dirty | Instinct | Knowledge | Mystery | Reality | Soul | Spirit |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

I believe in the flesh and the appetites, seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from, the scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer, this head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

Mystery |

Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

Berkshire Hathaway will sell you insurance, carpeting or any of our other products in exchange for options identical to those you grant yourselves.

Dynamic | Fame | Fortune | Mystery | Value |

Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

There seem to be two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to dis-identify themselves with the ego, by realizing its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being.

Mystery |

Wendell Berry

Nothing is given that is not Taken, and nothing taken That was not first gift. The gift is balanced by its total loss, and yet, And yet the light breaks in, Heaven seizing its moments That are at once its own and yours.

Day | Future | Government | Hope | Little | Love | Man | Mind | Mystery | Praise | Will | Work | Government | Approval |

Wendell Berry

A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.

Liberty | Mind | Mystery |

Wendell Berry

He had nothing he could do with is life's work now except leave it to a man who thought nothing of it.

Blasphemy | Dishonor | God | Good | Indispensable | Life | Life | Love | Mystery | Nature | Nothing | Pleasure | Respect | Usefulness | Work | Respect | God |

Wendell Berry

Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free — and should be encouraged — to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.

Future | Little | Mind | Mystery | Will |

W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

In a rapture of distress; in the deserts of the heart let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days teach the free man how to praise. [in memory of W.B. Yeats]

History | Mystery |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Ego is not the source of the Shadow and the Shadow is not the source of Ego. The Shadow does not have to be made conscious to the Ego to effect its Holy Mission. The Ego does not have to be conscious to the Shadow to effect its Holy Mission. Both Ego and Shadow are completely under the egis of the Self. The Shadow modulates…the Ego orients. The unconscious forces that make up the Ego and the Shadow are Transpersonal and Holy. They must not be appropriated by either the Ego or the Shadow and certainly not by the ego….the surface awareness. Shadow formation is never a conscious process nor does it need to be made conscious. It functions best unconsciously….just as the forces of the Ego operate best unconsciously. The Shadow can live through an individual, a family, a clan, a tribe, a community, a nation, and all of Humanity as a function of the intrinsic nature of Temporality/Manifestation/Time/Space. It is a part of Divinity’s (Self’s) Homeostasis or the Holy Love mystery of Balance. It is innate to the Wholeness or Holiness of Self.

Ego | Free will | Illusion | Life | Life | Mystery | Play | Self | Will |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

May I suggest that the deepest experience in vulnerability is to completely accept its Suchness as the ego/Ego coming into fuller relationship with the Divine. Thought forms of past, present, and future are simply too ego indulgent in the later stages of life. Variations on this theme are Masochism/Sadism and Pleasers/InyourFaceers. They are legitimate paths unless arrested by the ego too frightened to see what actually lurks under the drive to power.

Attention | Dynamic | Ego | Life | Life | Mystery | Nothing | Opportunity | People | Wholeness | Will | Loss | Think |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

What a fool I am… Perhaps it is a fool's experience of life that most approximates Eden...a fool's paradise precluded to the very intelligent. Is Forest Gump's foolish life just one paradisical poem after another, each episode delivering him into Eden after Eden, physically, psychologically and spiritually? Does my anxious educated and socially conditioned thinking, occult my own manifested Edens?

Ego | Experience | Mystery | Power | Relationship | Sacrifice | Simplicity |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The four sacred arts require the leaving aside of the personal psyche and being taken or vastly influenced by the Transcendent process. Information appears and response patterns appear that you know are not your ordinary dynamics. Patriarchy has brought us to consciousness, discernment, differentiation, and it has appreciated what the Feminine cannot appreciate. It provides meaning, purpose, understanding how things work, it provided technology, it is form, structure – it is not to be resented – it is the law. The law is always resented, but, what is the function of the law? It establishes boundaries, and it sets up a demeanor that actually transforms certain very primitive images and contains them in some way. The shadow content of the Masculine is rigidity, tyranny, alienation, indifference to relationships, extreme impersonality. The Feminine is connection, wholeness, nurturing as a primary process, giving substance of itself to create a life, to be involved in the production of feeling and wisdom. Knowledge is an aspect of the Masculine. It´s very important to know the difference between information/knowledge, and wisdom. No matter how much knowledge you have in your life, it will never lead you to wholeness – that requires wisdom, awareness of rhythms and cycles. The Feminine is involved in the creation of time and space, rhythms and movement. If you want to get in touch with and experience time and space, you don’t go to the Masculine psyche, you go to the Feminine. If you want information about time and space, you go to the Masculine side – information, conceptualizations, distinctions, discernment. The shadow of the Feminine involves chaos, destruction, devouring. When either side is devalued, it indicates a defense at an unconscious level because it has power over you. The whole idea of what is Feminine is really quite an adventure at this point in time. It was mistaken for warrior-like qualities – these are all in defense to what is really one of its most powerful attributes: the vulnerability, the chaos, the non-rational. The Women’s movement failed because it was involved with the Feminine, but in reaction, with a masculine kind of energetic, so they masculinized women. To get vulnerable again and discover what these forces are means to let go of collective images, and rediscover them for ourselves.

Ego | Humanity | Love | Mystery | Nature | Need | Wholeness |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Self, The Ego, and The Shadow operate in time and out of time. The ego operates almost exclusively in time. The Ego is the chief organ of Temporal Awareness.

Ability | Age | Enjoyment | Experience | Individual | Inspiration | Life | Life | Model | Mystery | People | Rest | Sense | Unique | Will | Work | Old |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

If we are to appreciate the inner dynamics we don't need to change them or judge them. There is wisdom in each of the dynamics observed. To determine what you think should happen is placing the ego in charge of the show. When the deep beingness seeks a change you will know it. Otherwise the wisdom is to put oneself in accord with the Mystery. This is hard for anyone with degrees of control issues.

Challenge | Ego | Extreme | Mystery | Need | Phenomena | Power | Sense | Success | Time | Loss | Value |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego.

Death | Honor | Means | Mother | Mystery | Need | World |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

As if in a school for gods, we learn the consequences of thought.

Conquest | Ego | Energy | Giving | Important | Impulse | Mystery | Self | Will |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

I believe that if you put fine food into a body with a crummy mind, you get a crummy body, but if you put crummy food into a body with expanded awareness, you get a fine body.

Defense | Experience | Mystery | Pain |