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

William James

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

Consciousness | Existence | Nature |

William James

It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.

Consciousness | Perception | Psychology | Sense |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

In our natural body every part has a necessary sympathy with every other, and all together form, by their harmonious conspiration, a healthy whole.

Consciousness | Knowledge |

William James

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Absolute | Body | Conscience | Consciousness | Education | Energy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Meaning | Miracles | Present | Religion | Science | World | God | Think |

William James

That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it.

Consciousness | Ideals | Regard | World |

William James

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

Church | Consciousness | Dignity | Eternal | Little | Past | Salvation | Soul | Theology | Old |

William James

The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

Attention | Consciousness | Object | Peculiarity |

William James

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

Consciousness | Mind | Suppression |

William James

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Consciousness | Mistake |

William James

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the

Consciousness | Day | Decision | Psychology | Resolution | Struggle | Time | Will | Think |

William James

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Consciousness | Education | Life | Life | Meaning | Present | World |

William James

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

Consciousness | Mind | Nothing | Psychology | Sense |

William James

THE TOUGH-MINDED. Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.

Consciousness |

William James

There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.

Consciousness | Present | Scepticism | Truth |

William James

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Consciousness | Hypothesis | Metaphysics | Psychology | Soul | Theology | Unity | Work |

François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.

Compensation | Evil | Good |

Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

That eagle that is flying high in the sky should not forget that if it should come down one day to see its shadow.

Awareness | Body | Consciousness | Space | Will | Awareness |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The worst effect of sin is within, and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.

Consciousness | Defeat | Faith | Hope |

Egyptian Proverbs

Popular beliefs on essential matters must be examined in order to discover the original thought.

Achievement | Consciousness | Indispensable |

Eileen Garrett

You will not mind if I say that where there is unhappiness in a house and there is an impression of someone [i.e. a departed spirit] coming back, it is because you make for that spirit a Garden of Memory in which it can live and revive its sufferings. Unless you are, consciously or unconsciously, in a state of mind in which this impression can vivify itself, you will not be troubled. Haven't you discovered that these things only happen to you when you are in a bad emotional state, physically or mentally disturbed? Don't you realize that you yourself vivify this memory?

Change | Consciousness | Control | Harmony | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Peace | Present | Regard | Time | Work |