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

Tom Gregory

The purpose of growth: to maximize our ability to be loving, joyful and creative… Growth is not just about striving to be better. It is also about enjoying the moment and accepting yourself as you are (knowing that you are or will do your best to change what you can).

Ability | Better | Change | Growth | Knowing | Purpose | Purpose | Will |

Václav Havel

I believe that, for the rest of the world, contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the best and the worst of our civilization. On the one hand, there are its profound commitment to enhancing civil liberty and to maintaining the strength of its democratic institutions, and the fantastic developments in science and technology which have contributed so much to our well-being; on the other, there is the blind worship of perpetual economic growth and consumption, regardless of their destructive impact on the environment, or how subject they are to the dictates of materialism and consumerism, or how they, through the omnipresence of television and advertising, promote uniformity, and banality instead of a respect for human uniqueness.

Advertising | Civilization | Commitment | Growth | Liberty | Materialism | Omnipresence | Respect | Rest | Science | Strength | Technology | Television | Uniformity | World | Worship | Respect |

Stanley Hopper, fully Stanley Romaine Hopper

Poetry will not save the world. But poetry can force the soul into the precincts of its last evasion.

Evasion | Force | Poetry | Soul | Will | World |

David Starr Jordan

The infinite expanse of the universe, its growth through immeasurable periods of time, the boundless range of its changes, and the rational order that pervades it all, seems to demand an infinite intelligence behind its manifestations.

Growth | Intelligence | Order | Time | Universe |

Abraham Isaac Kook

Faith is the song of life. Woe to him who wishes to rob life of its splendid poetry. The whole mass of prosaic literature and knowledge is of value only when it is founded on the perception of the poetry of life.

Faith | Knowledge | Life | Life | Literature | Perception | Poetry | Wishes | Woe | Value |

Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze

Understand that true growth comes from meeting and solving the problems of life in a way that is harmonizing to yourself and to others. If you can follow these simple old ways, you will be continually renewed.

Growth | Life | Life | Problems | Will | Old |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as [the] inner confrontation of opposites.

Consciousness | Growth | Nothing |

Ding Ling, pseudonym of Jiǎng Bīngzhī, aka Bīn Zhǐ

Happiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight or recite poetry among the blossoms.

Poetry | Struggle |

Thomas Merton

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe.

Art | God | Music | Poetry | Soul | Universe | Art | God |

Nicanor Parra, bully Nicanor Parra Sandoval

In poetry everything is permitted. With only one condition, of course: you must improve upon the blank page.

Poetry |

Ssemiao NULL

He who would take good care of his health should be sparing in his tastes, banish his worries, temper his desires, restrain his emotions, take good care of his vital force, spare his words, regard lightly success and failure, ignore sorrows and difficulties, drive away foolish ambitions, avoid great likes and dislikes, calm his vision and his hearing, and be faithful in his internal regimen. How can one have sickness if he does not tire his spirits and worry his soul? Therefore he would nourish his nature should eat only when he is hungry and not fill himself with food, and he should drink only when he is thirsty and not fill himself with too much drink. He should eat little and between long intervals, and not too much and not too constantly. He should aim at being a little hungry when well-filled, and being a little well-filled when hungry. Being well-filled hurts the lungs and being hungry hurts the flow of vital energy.

Care | Emotions | Energy | Failure | Force | Good | Health | Little | Nature | Regard | Soul | Success | Temper | Vision | Words | Worry |

Charles M. Schultz

That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another....

Life | Life | Worry |