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

Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger

Two centuries ago, the philosopher Kant predicted that perpetual peace would come about eventually – either as the creation of man’s moral aspirations or as the consequence of physical necessity. What seemed utopian then looms as tomorrow’s reality; soon there will be no alternative.

Man | Necessity | Peace | Reality | Tomorrow | Will |

Howard Zinn

The money, technology, and human energy now devoted to the military could perform miracles in cleaning up the earth we live on. But the cost of the arms race is not only the enormous waste of resources. There is a psychic cost - the creation of an atmosphere of fear all over the world.

Cost | Earth | Energy | Fear | Miracles | Money | Race | Technology | Waste | World |

John Donne

Poetry is a counterfeit creation and makes things that are not, as though they were.

Poetry |

Johannes Scotus Erigena

We ought not to understand God and creation as two things distinct from each other, but as one and the same.

God | God | Understand |

John Ruskin

The laws, the life, and the joy of beauty in the material world of God, are as eternal and sacred parts of His creation as, in the world of spirits, virtue; and in the world of angels, praise.

Angels | Beauty | Eternal | God | Joy | Life | Life | Praise | Sacred | Virtue | Virtue | World | Beauty |

José Ortega y Gasset

The only true revolt is creation - the revolt against nothingness.

Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

There never were, since the creation of the world, two cases exactly parallel.

World |

Lewis Mumford

Man’s chief purpose… is the creation and preservation of value; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately to the individual and human life.

Civilization | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose |

Lewis Mumford

Man's chief purpose... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.

Civilization | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose |

Kahlil Gibran

All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.

Earth | Existence | Mind |

Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL

The way to achieve love for the Almighty is to concentrate on His deeds and creation and become aware of His infinite wisdom. The more you appreciate the complexity and beauty of the world, the greater your appreciation of the Almighty.

Appreciation | Beauty | Deeds | Love | Wisdom | World | Deeds | Appreciation | Beauty |

Martin Buber

The world is not divine play, it is divine fate. They that are the world, man, the human person, you and I, has divine meaning. Creation - happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to Him, helpers and companions.

Fate | Man | Meaning | Play | World |

Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

In the universal sense, love is the divine power of attraction in creation that harmonizes, unites, binds together... Those who live in tune with the attractive force of love achieve harmony with nature and their fellow beings, and are attracted to blissful reunion with God.

Force | God | Harmony | Love | Nature | Power | Sense |

Pierre Bayle

Our Reason is capable of nothing but the creation of a universal confusion and universal doubt.

Doubt | Nothing | Reason |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Robert Fritz

The way you activate the seeds of your creation is by making choices about the results you want to create. When you make a choice, you mobilize vast human energies and resources which otherwise go untapped. All too often people fail to focus their choices upon results and therefore their choices are ineffective. If you limit your choices only to what seems possible and reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.

Choice | Focus | People |

Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds fulfillment of something implanted in its nature.

Art | Fulfillment | God | Nature | Sense | Soul |

Oliver Lodge, fully Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge

We are rising to the conviction that we are a part of nature, and so a part of God; that the whole creation – the One and the many and the All-One – is travailing together toward some great end; and that now, after ages of development, we have at length become conscious portions of the great scheme, and can cooperate in it with knowledge and joy.

God | Joy | Knowledge | Nature |

Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi

The event of creation did not take place so many kalpas or eons ago, astronomically or biologically speaking. Creation is taking place every moment of our lives.