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

Albert Camus

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.

Harmony | Life | Life | Man | Happiness |

Alan Cohen

Our freedom depends on our willingness to see Perfection. The imperfection that we have been taught to see has led only to suffering... Perfection is not a standard to be achieved, but a truth to be acknowledged. It is not the difference between us and God, but the hallmark of our unity with Him. And the honoring of Perfection is not a sin of vanity, but the humble acceptance of our identity as offspring of the Eternal.

Acceptance | Eternal | Freedom | God | Imperfection | Perfection | Sin | Suffering | Truth | Unity |

Alan Cohen

It is time for you to understand the purpose of your life. You are a chalice for God’s Love and a vehicle for Him to bless the world. Realize your Divine purpose and your will is aligned with His. Goodness is the theme of all life. See the Perfection in your life and you recapture your Childhood Vision. As you give up patterns of evaluation and cynicism, you accept the benevolence of God. Pain is born of resistance, and joy is a function of the acceptance of God’s whole and Holy Love for you. Find purpose in your joy, and you find purpose in God.

Acceptance | Benevolence | Childhood | Cynicism | God | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Perfection | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Vision | Will | World | Understand |

Alfred North Whitehead

The foundation of all understanding... is that no static maintenance of perfection is possible. This axiom is rooted in the nature of things. Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind. The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.

Decadence | Fighting | Mankind | Nature | Perfection | Understanding | Universe |

Alfred North Whitehead

The task of theology is to show how the world is founded on something beyond transient fact, and how it issues in something beyond the perishing of occasions. The temporal world is the stage of finite accomplishment. We ask of theology to express that element in perishing lives which is undying by reason of its expression of perfection proper to our finite natures. In this way we shall understand how life includes a mode of satisfaction deeper than joy or sorrow.

Accomplishment | Joy | Life | Life | Perfection | Reason | Sorrow | Theology | World | Understand |

Arthur Schopenhauer

Our hesitation before such a colossal thought will perhaps be diminished by the recollection... that the ultimate dreamer of the vast life-dream is finally, in a certain sense, but one, namely the Will to Live, and that the multiplicity of appearances follows from the conditioning effects of time and space [the morphogenetic field whereby the Will to Live assumes forms]. It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything links and accords with everything else.

Life | Life | Sense | Space | Thought | Time | Will | Thought |

Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Religion is Man’s attempt to get into touch with an absolute spiritual Reality behind the phenomena of the Universe, and, having made contact with It, to live in harmony with It.

Absolute | Harmony | Man | Phenomena | Reality | Religion | Universe |

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 |

Arthur W Osborn

Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. If love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service.

Compassion | Cost | Doctrine | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Organic | Pain | Phenomena | Relationship | Service | Suffering | Truth | Unity | Universe | Witness |

Arthur W Osborn

Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. IF love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service.

Compassion | Cost | Doctrine | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Organic | Pain | Phenomena | Relationship | Service | Suffering | Truth | Unity | Universe | Witness |

Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

Mathematics... possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Art | Beauty | Mathematics | Music | Nature | Perfection | Truth | Art | Beauty |

Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL

Man reacheth perfection by each being intent on his own duty.

Duty | Man | Perfection |

Blaise Pascal

We find fault with perfection itself.

Fault | Perfection | Fault |

Charles Caleb Colton

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

Good | Harmony | Heart | Impulse | Man | Phenomena | Principles |

Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze

Perfection of hearing is not hearing others, but oneself. Perfection of vision is not seeing others, but oneself.

Perfection | Vision |