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

Ester and Jerry Hicks

If you're not selfish enough to want to feel good, then you can't connect with the energy that is your Source which does always feel good.

Desire | Will |

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

When we move from small-scale to medium-scale, the connection between ownership and work already becomes attenuated; private enterprise tends to become impersonal and also a significant social factor in the locality; it may even assume more than local significance.

Ideas | People | Sense | Think |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Be happy in anticipation of what's coming.

Desire | Energy | Good | Harmony | Will |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

The entire Universe is set up to produce wanting within you. You cannot squelch wanting. You are born wanters. Wanting is a good thing.

Desire | Expectation | Expectation |

Esther Perel

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting.

Desire | Love | Sense |

Esther Perel

Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.

Desire | Knowing | Love |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

Take the time to line up the Energy first, and action becomes inconsequential. If you don't take the time to line up the Energy, if you don't find the feeling place of what you're looking for, not enough action in the world will make any difference.

Desire | Money | Nature | Spirit | World |

Ester and Jerry Hicks

People say, "If I'm always setting goals and reaching for the future, then am I not squandering my now?" And we say, if in your NOW, you are using a future event to make you feel good, you are still feeling good in your now. And that's the best use of NOW that you could ever find.

Desire |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Further, laws and public transactions, together with everything that deserved the attention of mankind, were multiplied to such a degree, that the memory grew too weak for so heavy a burden; and human societies increased in such a manner, that the promulgation of the laws could not, without difficulty, reach the ears of every individual.

Ideas | Man | Memory |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

We see plainly what were the subjects of the earliest poems. At the first institution of societies, mankind could not as yet employ themselves in matters of amusement; so that the wants which obliged them to unite, at the fame time confined their views to whatever might be useful or necessary to them. Therefore poetry and music were cultivated merely with a design to promote the knowledge of religion and laws, or to preserve the memory of great men, and of the services which they had done to society.

Ideas | Size |

Eugene Peterson

We must extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates enclosed by our birth and death and acquire an understanding of God’s way as something larger and more complete than the anecdotes in our private diaries. Otherwise, we will always be “mistaking a sore throat for a descent into hell.”

Desire | Fulfillment | God | Growth | Infancy | Means | God | Blessed |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Language was a long time without having any other words than the names which had been given to sensible objects, such as these, tree, fruit, water, fire, and others, which they had more frequent occasion to mention.

Distinguish | Fear | Ideas | Metaphysics | Reason |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

In vain would outward objects solicit the senses, the mind would never have any knowledge of them, if it did not perceive them. Hence the first and smallest degree of knowledge is perception.

Habit | Ideas | Mankind | Time |

Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson

Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.

Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Our inquiries are sometimes more difficult, in proportion as the object of them is more simple. Our very perceptions are an instance of this. What is more easy in appearance than to determine whether the soul takes notice of all those perceptions by which it is affected? Need there anything more than to reflect on one's self? Doubtless all philosophers have done it.

Ideas |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

And yet it is not always in our power to revive the perceptions we have felt. On some occasions the most we can do is by recalling to mind their names, to recollect some of the circumstances atr tending them, and an abstract idea of perception; an idea which we are capable of framing every instant, because we never think without being conscious of some perception which it depends on ourselves, to render genera).

Happy | Ideas | Imagination | Men | Reason |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

The language of song or vocal music is not so familiar to us, as it was to the ancients'; and that of mere instrumental performance has no longer the air of novelty, which alone has so great an effect upon the imagination.

Ideas | Taste |

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

To produce harmony, the cadences ought not to be placed indifferently. Sometimes the harmony ought to be suspended, and at other times it ought to terminate with a sensible pause. Consequently in a language, whose prosody is perfect, the succession of sounds should be subordinate to the fall of each period, so that the cadences shall be more or less abrupt, and the ear shall not find a final pause, till the mind be entirely satisfied.

Government | Ideas | Order | Government |

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

Considered from the love in the real laws and in social forms of sexual union.

Desire | Means |

Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.