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

“Community” means with unity or oneness – the essence of which is harmony, sharing and a concern for others… Life is far more satisfying when you approach it not as a solitary journey, but with the perspective of “we are all in this together.”

Harmony | Journey | Life | Life | Means | Oneness | Unity |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

Calibrations are merely a shorthand means of denoting a level of consciousness that specifies both context and content. Each level has its own view of what is real and meaningful. This results in differences in motivation, value, lifestyle, or spiritual positionalities.

Consciousness | Means |

Romano Guardini

It means that there is significance in everything that happens in the world, and a heart, a concern, and a power stronger than all the powers of the world which is able to fulfill the purpose of its care for man.

Care | Heart | Man | Means | Power | Purpose | Purpose | World |

Kenneth Hanson, aka Ken Hanson

Sufficient time must be devoted to the process of “being” rather than “doing.” This is perhaps life’s greatest lesson of all. It is not only true that mindless materialism leaves us empty; materiality alone means that we do not know the value of time. We are actually afraid of time, as well as meaning and value; and this is why we turn to materialism.

Lesson | Life | Life | Materialism | Meaning | Means | Time | Afraid | Value |

Sidney Greenberg

Living life at its best means keeping on speaking terms with my conscience, to do nothing to outrage it or to inflict pain upon it. When my acts do violence to my moral or ethical standards, I sustain a loss for which no pleasure or material gain can compensate me, for I shrink in moral stature. When I keep my friendship with the best in me, I achieve a serenity which cloaks life with gentle beauty.

Beauty | Conscience | Life | Life | Means | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Serenity | Friendship | Loss |

Romano Guardini

The kingdom of God means that He, the Father, the Brother, the Friend, is near, in the depths of the spirit, in the core of the heart; that loves rules perceptibly in our goings and comings, our dispensing and our receiving; the whole of existence is transfigured by it, and that, while everything is transfigured into this one thing, the essential beauty and character of each blossoms forth.

Beauty | Character | Existence | Father | Friend | God | Heart | Means | Spirit | Beauty | God |

Joan Halifax, fully Roshi Joan Jiko Halifax

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?

Death | Inevitable | Knowing | Love | Means |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture through the purest tranquility of soul.

Culture | Means | Piety | Soul |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Reverence for God is shown in our reverence for man. The fear you must feel for offending or hurting a human being must be as ultimate as your fear of God. An act of violence is an act of desecration. To be arrogant toward man is to be blasphemous toward God.

Fear | God | Man | Reverence | God |

Tokugawa Ieyasu

The strong, manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means restraining one’s inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety, love, fear, grief, and hate; and if a man does not give way to these, he can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might be, but I have long known and practiced patience.

Anger | Anxiety | Anxiety | Emotions | Fear | Grief | Hate | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Means | Patience | Understand |

William James

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallible right.

Habit | Life | Life | Means | Right | System | Training | Will |

Gilbert Arthur Highet

Zen meditation does not mean sitting and thinking. On the contrary, it means acting with as little thought as possible. The fencing master trained his pupil to guard against every attack with the same immediate, instinctive rapidity with which our eyelid closes over our eye when something threatens it. His work is aimed at breaking down the wall between thought and act, at completely fusing body and senses and mind so that they might all work together rapidly and effortlessly.

Body | Little | Means | Meditation | Mind | Thinking | Thought | Work | Zen | Thought |

William James

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Genius | Little | Means |

Jinabhadra NULL

You should know that the chief characteristic of the soul is awareness, and that it existence can be proved by all valid means of proof. Souls may be classified as transmigrant and liberated, or as embodied in immobile and mobile beings.

Awareness | Existence | Means | Soul |

Herman Hesse

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Hate |