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

Joseph Parker

Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intellectual, or moral, till it finds a better and then the loss is a gain. No steps backward is the rule of human history. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, and is a permanent investment for all time.

Better | Good | History | Man | Mankind | Men | Rule | Time | Wisdom | Loss |

Paramananda, fully Swami Paramananda, born Suresh Chandra Guha-Thakurta NULL

Have faith in your immortal nature. Know that you are Spirit. Those who think they are limited and mortal, that they are born and that they die, are superstitious. Anything that is weakening, anything that is degenerating, anything that tells us that we are limited human beings is a terrible superstition. By all the means in our power we must overcome it. Let us tear aside this veil of superstition, recognize our true nature, and know that we are eternal, imperishable and immortal.

Eternal | Faith | Means | Mortal | Nature | Power | Spirit | Superstition | Wisdom | Think |

Sam Peckinpah

There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.

Madness | War | Will | Wisdom |

Richard R. Pharr

The human mind is the richest unexplored area of the world. The mind, like land, does not care what we plant. Good or bad, it returns what is planted.

Care | Good | Land | Mind | Wisdom | World |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The most vulnerable and at the same time the most unconquerable thing is human self-love; indeed, it is though being wounded that its power grows and can, in the end, become tremendous.

Love | Power | Self | Self-love | Time | Wisdom |

Thomas Paine

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

Circumstances | Progress | War | Wisdom |

Joseph Parker

The whole sum and substance of human history may be reduced to this maxim: that when man departs from the divine means of reaching the divine end, he suffers harm and loss.

Harm | History | Man | Means | Wisdom |

Heinz Pagels

Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.

Mind | Order | Reality | Reason | Science | System | Universe | Vision | Wisdom |

Thomas Paine

Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.

Invention | Mystery | Truth | Wisdom |

Bons (Leonidovich) Pasternak

Can a man control his future? Yes. Despite the system they live under, men everywhere have, I believe, more power over the future than ever before. The important thing is that we must choose to exercise it. What we do today determines how the world shall go, for tomorrow is made up of the sum total of today's experiences... Far from feeling hopeless or helpless, we must seize every opportunity, however small, to help the world around us toward peace, productivity and human brotherhood.

Brotherhood | Control | Future | Important | Man | Men | Opportunity | Peace | Power | System | Tomorrow | Wisdom | World |

Robert K. Patterson

Great strides in human progress are being made by men who delve deeply into the imagination, then through the medium of hard work, bring fancy into reality.

Imagination | Men | Progress | Reality | Wisdom | Work |

Joseph Parker

It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.

Evil | History | Trust | Wisdom | Wrong |

Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

Culture | Ideas | Knowledge | Nature | Order | Past | Society | Will | Wisdom | World | Society |

Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival

Every thing existing on the physical plain is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought and in accordance with that one's responsibility at the conjunction of time, condition and place. This law of thought is Destiny. Thinking is the basic factor in shaping human destiny. The machinery of the law is nature. The purpose of the universe is to make all units of matter conscious of progressively higher degrees.

Destiny | Law | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Thinking | Thought | Time | Universe | Wisdom | Thought |

Donald Culross Peattie

No matter how widely you have traveled, you haven't seen the world if you have failed to look in to the human hearts that inhabit it.

Wisdom | World |

Ramdas, fully Swami Ramdas, born Vittal Rao, aka Beloved Papa NULL

There is no greater victory in the life of a human being than victory over the mind. He who has controlled the gusts of passion that arise within him and the violent actions that proceed therefrom is the real hero.

Hero | Life | Life | Mind | Passion | Wisdom |

Walter Rauschenbusch

The influences that really make and mar human happiness are beyond the reach of the law.

Law | Wisdom | Happiness |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.

Ambition | Avarice | Birth | Curiosity | Falsehood | Flattery | Philosophy | Pride | Superstition | Wisdom |