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

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

Before he can know Who he is, man has to unlearn the mass of illusory knowledge hehas burdened himself with on the interminable journey from unconsciousness to consciousness. It is only through love that you can begin to unlearn, and, eventually, put an end to all that you do not know. God-love penetrates all illusion, while no amount of illusion can dim God-love. Start by learning to love God by beginning to love those whom you cannot. You will find that in serving others you are serving yourself. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the less you remember yourself; and when you completely forget yourself, you find me as the Source of all Love.

Beginning | God | Illusion | Journey | Kindness | Knowledge | Learning | Love | Man | Unconsciousness | Will | God |

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

In life after death, the experiences of pain and pleasure become much more intense than what they were in the earthly life. And These subjective states of intensified suffering and joy are respectively called hell and heaven. Hell and heaven are states, of the mind; they should not be looked upon as being places; and, though, from the subjective point of view, they mean a great deal for the individualised soul, they are both illusions within the greater illusion of the phenomenal world.

Heaven | Hell | Illusion | Joy | Life | Life | Pain | Pleasure | Suffering |

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

God is Infinite and His Shadow is also infinite. The Shadow of God is the Infinite Space that accommodates the infinite Gross Sphere which, with its occurrences of millions of universes, within and without the ranges of men's knowledge, is the Creation that issued from the Point of Finiteness in the infinite Existence that is God.

Existence | God | Space | God |

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

Trust God completely and He will solve all your difficulties. Faithfully leave everything to Him and He will see to everything. Love God sincerely and He will reveal Himself to you. I am never silent. I speak eternally. The voice that is heard deep within the soul is My voice...the voice of inspiration, of intuition, of guidance. To those who are receptive to this voice, I speak. Everything is Mine except for Myself; Myself is for those who love Me. I am the Ancient One, The Highest of the High. Love Me; Love Me; Love Me; and you will find Me. This is Truth but intellect cannot grasp it, wisdom cannot weigh it, space cannot hold it, time cannot check it, angels cannot fathom it, but human beings can realize it through love, the Divine Love, the Love for the Almighty, except whom, nothing is. If you have rock-like faith in God and flame-like love for Him, nothing in this world will affect you. Misery will not trouble you, flattery will not touch you, happiness will not humour you. Such faith and love will cause you to rise above the imaginary phenomenon and make you understand that God alone is real. Trust God completely and He will solve all your difficulties. Faithfully leave everything to Him and He will see to everything. Love God sincerely and He will reveal Himself to you. This love needs no ceremonies and show. Your heart must love so that even your mind is not aware of it. Let nothing shake your faith in Me, and all your bindings will be shaken off. Once you open your wings to fly, you must fly straight like the swan. Do not flit from tree to tree like the sparrow, or many things will distract you.

Cause | Faith | Flattery | God | Heart | Love | Mind | Nothing | Soul | Space | Time | Truth | Will | Trouble | God | Happiness | Intellect | Understand |

Merce Cunningham, born Mercier Philip Cunningham

Dance is an art in space and time. The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.

Art | Object | Space | Art |

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

The individual souls are like the drops in the ocean. Just as each drop in the ocean is fundamentally identical with the ocean, the soul which is individualised due to bhas or illusion is still the Oversoul, and does not really become separate from the Oversoul.

Illusion | Individual | Soul |

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

All illusion comes and goes, but the soul remains unchanged. What is meant by God-realization is to actually experience this important thing — that the soul is eternal.

Experience | Illusion | Important | Soul |

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

God is eternally free. To realize God is to attain liberation from the bondage of illusion. The greater the strife and the more intensified the struggle to attain liberation, the more the shackles of illusion are felt, because this very action brings greater awareness of the illusion, which then becomes all the more impressive and realistic. All actions, whether good or bad, just or unjust, charitable or uncharitable, are responsible in making the bond of illusion firmer and tighter. The goal is to achieve perfect inaction, which does not mean merely inactivity. When the self is absent, one achieves inaction in one's every action.

Action | Awareness | God | Good | Illusion | Self | Struggle | God | Awareness |

Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani

The individual mind is the seat of the ego or the consciousness of being isolated. It creates the limited individuality, which at once feeds and is fed by the illusion of duality time and change. So, in order to know the self as it is, consciousness has to be completely freed from the limitation of the individual mind. In other words, the individual mind has to disappear but consciousness has to be retained.

Consciousness | Duality | Ego | Illusion | Individual | Mind | Order | Self | Time |

Michael Murphy

Perhaps a new kind of inspired physicist, experienced in the yogic modes of perception, might arise to comprehend the further reaches of matter, space and time. A physicist (if he were still called that) trained in yogic perception would compare his discoveries with those derived from today's "normal" physics, and there would probably be a "principle of complementarity" existing between the insights derived from the various consciousness states, "normal" and "yogic". Physics would be entirely empirical (in this broadened sense), its findings with instruments ranging from the ordinary senses and their physical extensions (telescopes, radar, etc.) to the subtle yogic ways (indriyas) of apprehending the universe.

Consciousness | Perception | Space |

Michael Lerner

We need to build millions of little moments of caring on an individual level. Indeed, as talk of a politics of meaning becomes more widespread, many people will feel it easier to publicly acknowledge their own spiritual and ethical aspirations and will allow themselves to give more space to their highest vision in their personal interactions with others. A politics of meaning is as much about these millions of small acts as it is about any larger change. The two necessarily go hand in hand.

Individual | Little | Meaning | Need | People | Politics | Space | Vision | Will |

Michel Foucault

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Illusion | Man | Object | Power | Prison | Reflection | Soul |

Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce

We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life. ... We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. In the future — not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century — these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.

Culture | Future | Man | Panic | People | Society | Space | Will | Words | Society | Understand |

Michel Foucault

In the medicine of species, disease has, as a birthright, forms and seasons that are alien to the space of societies. There is a ‘savage’ nature of disease that is both its true nature and its most obedient course: alone, free of intervention, without medical artifice, it reveals the ordered, almost vegetal nervure of its essence.

Disease | Nature | Space |

Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

Illusion | Child | Parent |

Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo

The most tragic thing in the world and in life... is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine against death, for it is death's brother.

Consolation | Illusion | Love | World | Child | Parent |

Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce

When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.

Man | Space | Will | Words |

Michel Foucault

By power… I do not understand a general system of domination exercised by one element or one group over another, whose effects… traverse the entire body social… It seems to me that first what needs to be understood is the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent to the domain wherein they are exercised, and that are constitutive of its organization; the game that through incessant struggle and confrontation transforms them, reinforces them, inverts them; the supports these relations of force find in each other, so as to form a chain or system, or, on the other hand, the gaps, the contradictions that isolate them from each other; in the end, the strategies in which they take effect, and whose general pattern or institutional crystallization is embodied in the mechanisms of the state, in the formulation of the law, in social hegemonies. The condition of possibility of power… should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique space of sovereignty whence would radiate derivative and descendent forms; it is the moving base of relations of force that incessantly induce, by their inequality, states of power, but always local and unstable. Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.

Body | Existence | Force | Omnipresence | Power | Space | Struggle | System | Unique | Understand |

Michel Foucault

Disease is perceived fundamentally in a space of projection without depth, of coincidence without development. There is only one plane and one moment. The form in which truth is originally shown is the surface in which relief is both manifested and abolished—the portrait.

Coincidence | Space | Truth |

Michel Foucault

It is a space in which analogies define essences. The pictures resemble things, but they also resemble one another. The distance that separates one disease from another can be measured only by the degree of their resemblance, without reference to the logico-temporal divergence of genealogy.

Disease | Space |