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

Sara Davidson

The ability to laugh at life is right at the top, with love and communication in the hierarchy of our needs. Humor has much to do with pain; it exaggerates the anxieties and absurdities we feel, so that we gain distance and through laughter, relief.

Ability | Character | Humor | Laughter | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Right | Wisdom |

Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, born Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds; and these invaluable communication are within the reach of all.

Books | Character | Wisdom |

Marya Mannes

It is not enough to show people how to live better: there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.

Better | Character | Enough | People |

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 |

William Ellery Channing

The mind in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.

Body | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Light | Mind | Nature | Revelation | Wisdom |

William Ellery Channing

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Books | Means | Men | Wisdom |

Marvin E. Frankel

The advertising industry is one of our most basic forms of communication and, allegedly, of information. Yet, obviously, much of this ostensible information is not purveyed to inform but to manipulate and to achieve a result -- to make somebody think he needs something that very possibly he doesn't need, or to make him think one version of something is better than another version when the ground for such a belief really doesn't exist.

Advertising | Belief | Better | Industry | Need | Wisdom | Think |

Brian Greer

There is no separation between a patient’s neurobiology, spiritual life, life perspectives, and quality of life force. Words, and spiritual/therapeutic interventions can tangibly affect a patient’s neurochemistry and physical health just as assuredly as psycho-pharmacological drugs can tangibly affect a patient’s feelings and thoughts... I have found that working with the meaning of a patient’s illness can profoundly alter not only the prognosis but can influence and give meaning to all other aspects of a patient’s life. Depression, for example, is often a direct communication from the soul that one’s belief system is not working... It is all too easy, and part of the human condition, to be misled by our lower half into believing that the sensory world is all that’s real.

Belief | Depression | Example | Feelings | Force | Health | Influence | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul | System | Wisdom | Words | World |

Rockwell Kent

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

Art | Mankind | Means | Understanding | Wisdom |

Thomas Merton

Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.

Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

Ralph C. Smedley

Real communication is impossible without listening.

Listening | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

The biological origins of awareness... Contact, communication and recognition all take place at a very simple level - occurring even amongst social bacteria that seem to be able to recognise self from non-self.

Awareness | Self | Wisdom |

Joseph Whitfield

Now that man has again evolved to a point where he can make the transition into fourth dimensional consciousness, communication and contacts with extraterrestrial beings has greatly increased. The presence of extraterrestrials should be on of the most reassuring events that is taking place on Earth. Instead, it is often the cause of great fear and apprehension. Fear is born of ignorance. Were it not so, people would welcome their space brothers with open arms. All major governments have repeatedly received information to explain the ET presence. They have been ignored as the product of a deranged mind. At some point some one must come to the realization that the problem of the existence of spacecraft is not going to disappear because man officially refuses to recognize their presence.

Cause | Consciousness | Earth | Events | Existence | Fear | Ignorance | Man | Mind | People | Space | Wisdom |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual.

Age | Heart | Individual | Spirit | Tradition | World |

Joseph Priestley

All those who labor in the discovery and communication of truth, if they are actuated by a love of it and a sense of its importance to the happiness of mankind may consider themselves as workers together with God.

Discovery | God | Labor | Love | Mankind | Sense | Truth | Discovery | Happiness |

Virginia Satir

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

Family | Feelings | Individual | Worth |

George Santayana

Trust in memory, in expectation, in mutual communication of many minds might have issued in a system like modern psychologism: the view that all we see, say, and think is false, but that the only truth is that we see, say and think it. If nothing be real except experience, nothing can be true except biography.

Expectation | Experience | Memory | Nothing | System | Trust | Truth | Think |