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

Saul Bellow

Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm… an arrest of attention in the mist of distraction.

Achievement | Art | Attention | Prayer |

Saul Bellow

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Achievement | Art | Attention | Prayer | Art | Think |

J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown

Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist is likely to find that his suggestions have fallen on fertile soil so long as he delivers his message with an eye to the existing attitudes and intellectual level of his audience.

Blame | Enemy | Need | People |

Peter R. Breggin

Mental illness is in the eye of the controller.

James MacGregor Burns

Transactional leaders approach followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another: jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions… The transforming leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.

Looks | Motives | Relationship | Leader | Leadership |

Charles Edward Garman

Reason inspired by love of truth is the only eye with which man can see the spiritual heavens above us.

Love | Man | Reason | Truth |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

World |

Nâzım Hikmet

When the light of the star which flows into my eyes as a drop of gold first pierced the darkness in space, there was not a single eye on earth looking at the sky.

Darkness | Earth | Gold | Light | Space |

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 |

Washington Irving

Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface. He, however, who would study nature in its wilderness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.

Nature | Society | Study |

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty |

Theodore Roethke

What shakes the eye but the invisible?

Fritz A. Rothschild

To the spiritual eye space is frozen time, and all things are petrified events.

Events | Space | Time |

Albert Schweitzer

Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in all the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? If you have ever considered how intolerable the burden of our life would be without the understood certainty that it has an appointed end, you know that death comes to all, even the most fortunate, not as an enemy but as a deliverance.

Death | Enemy | Envy | Future | Life | Life | Malice | People | Troubles |

William Wordsworth

I felt the sentiment of Being spread o’er all that moves and all that seemeth still; o’er that, lost beyond the reach of thought and human knowledge, to the human eye invisible, yet liveth to the heart.

Heart | Knowledge | Sentiment | Thought | Thought |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Mind |

Richard Carlson

Have you ever noticed or thought about how little eye contact most of us have with strangers? Why? Are we afraid of them? What keeps us from opening our hearts to people we don't know?

Little | People | Thought | Afraid | Thought |