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

José Iturbi

The only time you have a reputation is when you're not living up to it.

Character | Reputation | Time |

Huang Po, also Huángbò Xīyùn

Do not build up your views upon your senses and thoughts, do not base your understanding upon you senses and thoughts; but at the same time do not seek the Mind away from your senses and thoughts, do not try to grasp Realty by rejecting your senses and thoughts. When you are neither attached to, nor detached from, then, then you enjoy your perfect unobstructed freedom, then you have your seat of enlightenment.

Character | Enlightenment | Freedom | Mind | Time | Understanding |

Gloria D. Karpinski

Anything unforgiven is held in the body, the emotions, the mind, and even the soul. Unreleased, it crystallizes, forming obstructions in the very pathways along which energy must flow. Given enough time to harden, it will result in sickness.

Body | Character | Emotions | Energy | Enough | Mind | Soul | Time | Will |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

It’s quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards. But one then forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forwards. A principle which, the more one thinks it through, precisely leads to the conclusion that life in time can never properly be understood, just because no moment can acquire the complete stillness needed to orient oneself backwards.

Character | Life | Life | Philosophy | Time |

Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

The God-relationship determines what love is between man and man, then love is kept from pausing in any self-deception or illusion, while certainly the demand for self-abnegation and sacrifice is again made more infinite. The love which does not lead to God, the love which does not have this as its sole goal, to lead the lovers to love God, stops at the purely human judgment as to what love and what love’s sacrifice and submission are; it stops and thereby escapes the possibility of the last and most terrifying horror of the collision: that in the love relationship there are infinite differences in the idea of what love is.

Character | God | Illusion | Judgment | Love | Man | Relationship | Sacrifice | Self | Self-deception | Submission |

James Joll

The tragedy of all political action is that some problems have no solution; none of the alternatives are intellectually consistent or morally uncompromising; and whatever decision is taken will harm somebody.

Action | Character | Decision | Harm | Problems | Tragedy | Will |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Character | Life | Life | Time | Wisdom |

Walter Savage Landor

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

Character | Future | Human nature | Life | Life | Little | Looks | Nature | Present |

Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL

Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.

Action | Character | Hope | Reward |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen.

Action | Character | Responsibility |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

This spectacle of old age would be unendurable if we did not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death is a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.

Age | Birth | Change | Character | Death | Old age | Time | Wisdom | Old |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Aggression | Character | Love | Man | Method | Retaliation | Revenge |

Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva

There is a sort of natural instinct of human dignity in the heart of man which steels his very nerves not to bend beneath the heavy blows of a great adversity.

Adversity | Character | Dignity | Heart | Instinct | Man |

Holger Kalweit

The fool exposes the limitations of human criteria, confronts us anew with the undefined nature of our cosmic existence, leads us backstage to make us aware of the artificiality of our cultural values, and then shows us a world without limit, because it is neither categorized nor ordered in accordance with artificial opposites. The sick jester removes these opposites, tears down external and internal barriers and causes us to tumble head over heels from our tailor-made world of lines and demarcations into a more comprehensive and holistic dimension that has no beginning or end.

Beginning | Character | Existence | Nature | Tears | World |