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

Robertson Davies

Perhaps the word for the feeling I mean is serenity, a high acceptance, a recognition that Heracleitus's doctrine of eternal flow is a great truth, and while we may not, in ourselves, find the moment when the one element changes into the other, that moment will come and the consciousness of its inevitability may give us courage in adversity, and balance in good fortune.

Balance | Consciousness | Courage | Doctrine | Eternal | Good | Will |

Robert Bly

The walnut of my brain glows. I feel it irradiate the skull. I am aware of the consciousness I have, and I mourn the consciousness I do not have.

Consciousness | Mourn |

Ron and Mary Hulnick, formally H. Ronald Hulnick and

One of the principles of spiritual psychology is that "healing is the application of loving to the parts inside that hurt." If ever there was a way to transform a life of quiet desperation into a life of effective peaceful living, healing inner hurts surely ranks right up there. As you resolve issues, you stand up in who you truly are and find purpose and meaning in sharing your unique contribution. The more issues you resolve, the more you evolve spiritually, the more peaceful and caring you become, and the more you contribute to the evolution of consciousness of the human species. As we say at USM, "Every time one person resolves one issue, all of humanity evolves." Meaning is a natural and automatic by-product of a life filled with acts of love. If you want to live a life filled with meaning, start expressing from your essential loving nature. Start singing your song.

Consciousness | Desperation | Evolution | Humanity | Life | Life | Meaning | Principles | Psychology | Purpose | Purpose | Quiet | Right | Time | Unique |

Sheila Peltz Weinberg

The kinds of spiritual practices we can undertake are limitless. However, ultimately the form is less important than these factors: the commitment to practice, the ability to keep returning to the intention, the attitude one brings to the uncontrollable and the ability to transfer the benefits of the practice into how we live our lives, how we relate to ourselves and others, how free we become to embody the values and ideals we embrace in our minds, how we deal with temptations of all sorts. In other words we practice to live with the wisdom and compassion, which we already possess. We practice to actualize the pure soul, which God has planted with us.

Ability | Action | Anxiety | Anxiety | Attention | Body | Change | Character | Consciousness | Consequences | Desire | Focus | Forgetfulness | Generosity | Habit | Intention | Language | Meditation | Mind | Nature | Object | Order | Pain | Power | Practice | Prayer | Promise | Reality | Sabbath | Speech | Taste | Temptation | Time | Training | Unconsciousness | Torah | Temptation |

Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

Thus the Atlanteans could control what one calls the life force. As today one extracts the energy of heat from coal and transforms it into motive power for our means of locomotion, the Atlanteans knew how to put the germinal energy of organisms into the service of their technology. One can form an idea of this from the following. Think of a kernel of seed-grain. In this an energy lies dormant. This energy causes the stalk to sprout from the kernel. Nature can awaken this energy which reposes in the seed. Modern man cannot do it at will. He must bury the seed in the ground and leave the awakening to the forces of nature. The Atlantean could do something else. He knew how one can change the energy of a pile of grain into technical power, just as modern man can change the heat energy of a pile of coal into such power. Plants were cultivated in the Atlantean period not merely for use as foodstuffs but also in order to make the energies dormant in them available to commerce and industry. Just as we have mechanisms for transforming the energy dormant in coal into energy of motion in our locomotives, so the Atlanteans had mechanisms in which they — so to speak — burned plant seeds, and in which the life force was transformed into technically utilizable power. The vehicles of the Atlanteans, which floated a short distance above the ground travelled at a height lower than that of the mountain ranges of the Atlantean period, and they had steering mechanisms by the aid of which they could rise above these mountain ranges.

Consciousness | Earth | Energy | Force | Life | Life | Man | Mankind | Order | Price | Soul | Thinking | Thought | Thought |

Rudolf Otto

The truly mysterious ‘object’ is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently `wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in wonder that strikes us chill and numb.

Consciousness | Ethics | Feelings | Giving | Ideas | Mind | Reason | Thought | Theoretical | Thought |

Rudyard Kipling

`Confound Romance!' . . . And all unseen / Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

Body | Capacity | Consciousness | Devotion | Means | Need | Relationship | Will | World |

Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner

We must eradicate from the soul all fear and terror of what comes towards Man, out of the future. We must acquire serenity in all feelings and sensations about the future. We must look forward with absolute equanimity to everything that may come. And we must think only that whatever comes is given to us by a world-directive full of wisdom. It is part of what we must learn in this age, namely, to live out of pure trust, without any security in existence - trust in the ever-present help of the spiritual world. Truly, nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us. And let us seek the awakening from within ourselves, every morning and every evening.

Art | Church | Consciousness | Dependence | Evolution | Listening | Religion | Revelation | Sacred | Unity | Words | Art |

Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL

The truly pure of heart are those who despise the things of earth and seek the things of heaven, and who never cease to adore and behold the Lord God living and true with a pure heart and soul.

Consciousness | Duty | Praise | Public |

Saint John of Kronstadt, fully John Il’ich Serguiev, aka Holy Father John of the Kronstadt NULL

When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun; also all the angels, your own Guardian Angel, and all the Saints of God. Truly they do; for they are all one in God, and where God is, there are they also. Where the sun is, thither also are directed all its rays. Try to understand what this means.

Church | Consciousness | Heart | Lord | Mother |

Samuel Butler

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Consciousness | Unconsciousness | Understand |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

Disease is a physical process that generally begins that equality which death completes.

Consciousness | Death | Entertainment | Equality | Gloom | Glory | Hero | Little | Man | Mortal | Nothing | Will | Wit | Instruction |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

Consciousness | Heart | Reflection | Thought | Tragedy | Thought |

Samuel Smiles

Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.

Action | Consciousness | Effort | Existence | Man | Men | Poverty | Power | Struggle | Will | World |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

We can see unmistakeably that there is an inner relationship between Zen and the warrior's life.

Consciousness | Desire | Self | War |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Consciousness is energy received and decoded by a structure. In human beings, the receiving-decoding structures are neuro-chemical.

Consciousness |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

Consciousness | Nature | Reality | Sense | World |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.

Body | Consciousness | Contemplation | Death | Distinction | Evil | Existence | Future | Grief | Guilt | Individual | Life | Life | Thought | Contemplation | Thought |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.

Consciousness | Nature | Reality | World | Value |