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

Egyptian Proverbs

Trusting men is like trusting water in a sieve.

Consciousness |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

Consciousness | Nothing |

Elif Safak

Sometimes ... yaralanıveririz so suddenly. But every wound will heal itself. Eventually heals, top off. Stored in the eyes. Does not want to be seen because there is no wound. As long as they advocate the wound pupils. Because if pupils are injured, you cannot look the world in the same way ever again. You start to see the bad side of everything you look at. Contaminants that have remained hidden even run away from his eyes. Did not see things that other people feel the same anymore and you do not love them anymore. Uncomfortable. They cannot look you in the same way again. This is close to you, so no one wants to see. Picture the same image, in fact, changing your eyes. If you walk out the picture, everything remains as before, not everyone is comfortable. Personally, I think it is best to go in such situations. Top go to the top. Out of spite.

Consciousness | Duty | God | Individual | Morality | Rule | God | Learn |

Elizabeth Drew, aka Elizabeth Brenner

The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

Consciousness | Meaning | Self | Writing | Propaganda |

Emil M. Cioran

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Consciousness |

Emma Goldman

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

Consciousness | Man | Philosophy | Society | Unity | Society | Teacher |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

It is necessary to dig deeper, down to the very meaning of the notion of being, and to show that the origin of all being, including that of nature, is determined by the intrinsic meaning of conscious life and not the other way around.

Consciousness | Life | Life |

Emmet Fox

The first thing that we have to realize is a fact of fundamental importance, because it means breaking away from all the ordinary prepossessions of orthodoxy. The plain fact is that Jesus taught no theology whatever. His teaching is entirely spiritual or metaphysical. Historical Christianity, unfortunately, has largely concerned itself with theological and doctrinal questions which, strange to say, have no part whatever in the Gospel teaching. It will startle many good people to learn that all the doctrines and theologies of the churches are human inventions built up by their authors out of their own mentalities… There is absolutely no system of theology of doctrine to be found in the Bible; it simply is not there.

Ability | Birth | Care | Consciousness | Debt | Determination | Discovery | Life | Life | Power | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Child |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

Otherwise than Being. It is a matter of stating the breaking apart of a destiny that reigns in essence whose fragments and modalities—despite their diversity—belong the ones to the others, that is…do not escape Order, as though the ends of the thread cut by the Parque were tied up again after being cut. It is a matter of thinking the possibility of being torn out of essence. To go where? To go into what region? To stand on what ontological plane? But to be torn out of essence contests the unconditional privilege of the question: where?…[This is a] uniqueness for which the out-of-self, the difference relative to self, is non-indifference itself in the extra-ordinary recurrence of the pronominal.

Consciousness | Obsession |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods.

Consciousness |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

To become conscious of a being is then always for that being to be grasped across an ideality and on the basis of a said. Eyen an empirical, individual being is broached across the ideality of logos. Subjectivity qua consciousness can thus be interpreted as the articulation of an ontological event, as one of the mysterious ways in which its 'act of being' is deployed.

Consciousness | Existence |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

The oneself does not rest in peace under its identity, and yet its restlessness is not a dialectical scission, nor a process equalizing difference. Its unity is not just added on to some content of ipseity, like the indefinite article which substantifies even verbs, 'nominalizing' and thematizing them. Here the unity precedes every article and every process; it is somehow itself the content.

Consciousness | Evidence | Man | Peace | Play | War |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

To deny the totality of being is for consciousness to plunge into a kind of darkness, where it would at least remain as an operation, as the consciousness of that darkness. Total negation then would be impossible, and the concept of nothingness illusory.

Consciousness | Individual |

Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

All enjoyment is also sensation - that is, knowledge and light. It is not just the disappearance of the self, but self-forgetfulness, as a first abnegation.

Consciousness | Existence | Experience | Phenomena |

Emmet Fox

It is not possible that you could ever find yourself anywhere where God was not fully present, fully active, able and willing to set you free.

Body | Consciousness | Desire | Forgiveness | Position | Prayer | Search | Will | Forgiveness | Forgive | Old |

Ervin László

We rarely write the names of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon – each unique and surely of crucial significance – as here, honoring them with a capital letter. This may seem trivial, but our dislocation from nature is one of the most serious schisms in our dismembered psyche and probably the most urgent relationship we need to heal.

Action | Consciousness | Energy | Important | Intention | Law | Power |

Ernest Becker

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.

Absence | Consciousness | Death | Evil | Means | Meditation | Men | Power |

Ernest Becker

The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

Ability | Character | Consciousness | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Terror | World |

Ernest Becker

In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not.

Ability | Character | Comfort | Consciousness | Defense | Fear | God | Ideas | Joy | Madness | Man | Meaning | Means | Men | People | Promise | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Wants | God | Thought |

E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

How can we disarm greed and envy? Perhaps by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced.

Compensation | Leisure | Sacrifice | Work |