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

Alexander Pope

Get your enemies to read your works in order to mend them, for your friend is so much your second self that he will judge too like you.

Friend | Order | Self | Will | Wisdom |

J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine

There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics.

Dreams | Law | Man | Mind | Order | Religion | Universe | Wisdom | World |

Jules Renard, aka Pierre-Jules Renard

Words are the small change of thought.

Change | Thought | Wisdom | Words |

Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

What you keep by you, you may change and mend; but words, once spoken, can never be recalled.

Change | Wisdom | Words |

J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine

If parapsychology deals with all the personality manifestations that are beyond explanation by physics, then by definition it should claim the entire spiritual order of reality.

Order | Personality | Reality | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The training of children is a profession where we must know to lose time in order to gain it.

Children | Order | Time | Training | Wisdom |

Albert Schweitzer

The basic significance of all difficulty is that it reorients us from the external to the spiritual. the meaning and purpose of the world remain to a large extent inexplicable. but one thing is clear: the purpose of all events is spiritual.

Difficulty | Events | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom | World |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards. To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children.

Children | Day | Liberty | Men | Need | Nothing | Order | Patriotism | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Wisdom | Work |

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer

Each truth sparkles with a light of its own, yet it always reflects some light upon another; a truth, while lighting another, springs from one, in order to penetrate another. The first truth is an abundant sense, from which all others are colored, and each particular truth, in its turn, resembles a great river that divides into an infinite number of rivulets.

Light | Order | Sense | Truth | Wisdom |

V. S. Seturaman

The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.

Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |

Sam Shoemaker, fully Samuel "Sam" Moor Shoemaker, III

Prayer may not change things for you, but it sure changes you for things.

Change | Prayer | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to lose time in order to gain it.

Children | Order | Time | Training | Wisdom |