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

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

We need to suffer that we may learn to pity.

Character | Need | Pity | Learn |

Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

Adventure | Change | Character | Daring | Fate | Life | Life | Nothing | Strength | Fate |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

Behavior | Change | Character | Heart | Morality |

Jaron Lanier, fully Jaron Zepel Lanier

Life is based on limitation and compromise. The fact that we forget the meaning of life is the meaning of life. Being in a state of partial awareness allows experience and life to progress. God, as an omniscient being, is not an “experiencing being” because his or her experience is not new. If You were going to start a universe, what would Your options be? You could choose to remain totally stagnant, but that wouldn’t amount to a true universe. You’d need entities that experience it, entities that are fragile and temporary and not omniscient. That’s who we are and why we’re here.

Awareness | Character | Experience | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Need | Progress | Universe | Awareness |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

This spectacle of old age would be unendurable if we did not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death is a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.

Age | Birth | Change | Character | Death | Old age | Time | Wisdom | Old |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Relationship based on mutual need brings only conflict. However interdependent we are on each other, we are using each other for a purpose, for an end. With an end in view, relationship is not.

Character | Interdependent | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Relationship |

Gloria D. Karpinski

Self-knowledge is the primary step in conscious evolutionary change. When people confront and integrate their individual fears and limitations, they facilitate the confrontation and integration of our racial, national, and planetary fears. Lasting social change is only possible when individual consciousness has first been changed.

Change | Character | Consciousness | Individual | Integration | Knowledge | People | Self | Self-knowledge |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.

Better | Change | Character |

Melvyn Kinder

In the last twenty years we have developed this treadmill mentality. We think that by always reaching higher, accomplishing more - more money, a better body, the perfect mate - that we will automatically be happy. That’s an illusion. All this reaching is just making us crazy. We need to rest.

Better | Body | Character | Happy | Illusion | Money | Need | Rest | Will | Think |

Sinclair Lewis, fully Harry Sinclair Lewis

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

Character | Error | Life | Life | Need | Religion | Worth |

L. W. Lynett

The most effective way to cope with change is to help create it.

Change | Character |

James Russell Lowell

The foolish and dead alone never change their opinions.

Change | Character |

Alexander Maclaren

Transiency is stamped on all our possessions, occupations, and delights. We have the hunger for eternity in our souls, the thought of eternity in our hearts, the destination for eternity written on our inmost being, and the need to ally ourselves with eternity proclaimed by the most short-lived trifles of time. Either these things will be the blessing or the curse of our lives. Which do you mean that they shall be for you?

Character | Eternity | Hunger | Need | Possessions | Thought | Time | Trifles | Will | Thought |

John Locke

I think there cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason: which would be perfectly ridiculous and absurd if they were innate; or so much as self-evident, which every innate principle must needs be, and not need any proof to ascertain its truth, nor want any reason to gain its approbation.

Absurd | Character | Man | Need | Reason | Rule | Self | Truth | Think |