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 Schweitzer

The only road to a fuller grasp of Reality is the exploration of 'super-normal' perception.

Perception | Reality | Wisdom |

Richard and Greta Smolowe

We believe in a life continuum, and eternal life. Each incarnation or lifetime on earth is 'just a day in the classroom'... We believe the plane of greatest learning is the physical plane. It is up to all of us to make the most of each carnation. We believe that all there is in the universe is energy... and all energy forms, from subatomic particles to stars, are in a constant state of change and transformation... that interpreting energy frequencies on sensory bands creates the reality in which each life-form lives.

Change | Day | Earth | Energy | Eternal | Learning | Life | Life | Reality | Universe | Wisdom |

Richard and Greta Smolowe

We all would do well to entertain the possibility of new alternative realities; since it is our definition of reality that decides for each of us what is possible, and what is not possible... Our personal 'reality' is shaped by our thoughts. They determine how we perceive our future, our accomplishments, our relationships. Our emotions are our reactions to these thoughts and perceptions, and mirror our inner consciousness. They play a crucial role in our happiness and physical well-being.

Consciousness | Emotions | Future | Play | Reality | Wisdom | Happiness |

P. F. Strawson, fully Sir Peter Frederick Strawson

We must not suppose that the nature of reality is exhausted by the kinds of knowledge which we have of it.

Knowledge | Nature | Reality | Wisdom |

Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon

I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our ‘at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances.

Experience | Faith | Oneness | People | Reality | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

In short, human society is a product of evolution. It is created by natural selection and environmental pressures which bring individuals together in a special and powerful way, but it requires no physical change or mutation. It is a composition of ideas and beliefs - a new and essentially psychic phenomenon. A kind of supermind.

Change | Evolution | Ideas | Society | Wisdom | Society |

John Welwood

Only awareness can free us from our thoughts. In the moment we become aware that our thoughts are just thoughts, rather than reality itself, we wake up from their spell and can return to presence. It is empowering to dispel and can return to presence. It is empowering to discover that we are not enslaved by our thoughts, by how our mind interprets reality.

Awareness | Mind | Reality | Wisdom | Awareness |

Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Usually people interested in spiritual development think in terms of the importance of mind, that mysterious, high and deep thing that we have decided to learn about. But strangely enough, the profound and the transcendental are to be found in the factory. It may not fill you with bliss to look at it, it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we have read about, but somehow reality is to be found there in the way in which we relate with everyday problems. If we relate to them in a simple, earthy way, we will work in a more balanced manner, and things will be dealt with properly.

Enough | Good | Mind | People | Problems | Reality | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Work | Learn | Think |

Lyall Watson

All societies create their own worlds, using language and folklore to impose an arbitrary order on the complexity of the cosmos. This ordering of reality helps make sense of things by interpreting information in ways which are compatible with what is already known.

Language | Order | Reality | Sense | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable.

Eternal | Intelligence | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Reality | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Thought |

Steve Biko, fully Stephen "Steve" Bantu Biko

The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked because it makes people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a sophomoric to the blacks while salving the consciences of the few guilt-stricken whites.

Guilt | Integration | Myth | People | Reality |

Walter C. Alvarez, fully Walter Clement Alvarez

One of the great difficulties we physicians have in trying to help nervous patients is their tendency to jump to the conclusion that pains of psychic origin must be mild and wholly imaginary.

John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld

The world is full of paradox. For example, [in Buddhism] though no notion of a creator is entertained, great stress is laid upon the need for faith and piety. By faith is meant not trust in a benevolent diety avid for love, praise and obedience, but conviction that beyond the seeming reality misreported by our senses which is inherently unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively perceived, will give our lives undreamed-of meaning and endow the most insignificant object with holiness and beauty.

Beauty | Example | Faith | Love | Meaning | Mystery | Need | Obedience | Object | Paradox | Piety | Praise | Reality | Trust | Will | World |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Here is the test of wisdom, wisdom is not finally tested in schools, wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things.

Excellence | Immortality | Qualities | Reality | Soul | Wisdom | Excellence |

Sven Birkerts

The reality of life is that your perceptions -- right or wrong -- influence everything else you do. When you get a proper perspective of your perceptions, you may be surprised how many other things fall into place.

Influence | Life | Life | Reality | Right | Wrong |

Judi Chamberlin, née Ross

Modern mental hospitals, where every method of control has been euphemistically renamed, can be frightening places. The actions of every staff member – the aide who holds a patient down, the nurse who injects the medication, the doctor who prescribes it – all have been defined as benevolent. Patients who dare to utter the unauthorized reality – that they are prisoners and that their “helpers” are jailers – only provide further evidence that they are indeed ill. Succumbing to brainwashing, accepting reality as defined by one’s captors, differs from a psychiatric “cure” only because in the latter case the accepted reality is the prevailing one. Holding a minority position makes a person a potential subject for psychiatric brainwashing.

Control | Evidence | Method | Position | Reality |