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

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding.

Fortune | Life | Life | Wisdom | Worth |

Lyall Watson

If all Earth history is compressed into one “day”, the sea is mixed two thousand times in every “minute” of it, distributing warmth and energy evenly round our water-cooled and air-conditioned planet. Every eighteen “seconds” on this collapsed time scale, the world’s rivers dump enough dissolved salts into the sea to double its concentration, but this nevertheless remains around a resolute and reasonable 3 per cent. It is vital that this should be so, because few living cells can survive a salinity which exceeds, even for just a few seconds, a value of 6 per cent. Half the living matter in the world is still found in the sea, and that fact alone seems to make the chemical regulation not only necessary, but possible.

Day | Earth | Energy | Enough | History | Regulation | Time | Wisdom | World | Value |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, the races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, the oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, the lands to be welded together.

Earth | God | Marriage | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Wisdom |

Dhyani Ywahoo

We can listen to the voice of the Earth as she shakes and sings her song expressing her tiredness. She is calling us to attention, to be alert, to recognize that now is the time to transform selfish thought and action to compassionate caretaking. Do we want a world of peace and harmony? Are we willing to make that peace within ourselves? Will we call it forth? It is your choice. Your thought and action make a difference.

Action | Attention | Choice | Earth | Harmony | Peace | Thought | Time | Will | Wisdom | World | Thought |

Phil Batchelor

The time we spend on earth is but one tick of the eternal clock in an unending eternity. We are here in mortality for a brief moment and then on to the next stage of our development. It does not matter how many trials we have in life, just how we handle them. It does not matter how long we live, just how we live. How can we appreciate eternal good health if we have never experienced sickness, pain, or disease? How can we appreciate eternal joy if we have never experienced disappointment, hardship, or failure? How can we appreciate living forever if we have never known death?

Death | Disease | Earth | Eternal | Eternity | Failure | Good | Health | Joy | Life | Life | Pain | Time | Trials |

William Wordsworth

Blessings be with them, and eternal praise who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares, the poets, who on earth have made us heirs of truth and pure delight, by heavenly lays.

Blessings | Earth | Eternal | Praise | Truth | Wisdom |

Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – acquired significant power to alter nature of his world.

Earth | History | Life | Life | Nature | Power | Present | Time | World |

Phillips Brooks

Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God’s paradise.

Earth | God | Life | Life | Man | Paradise |

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence.

Earth | Faith | Good | Government | Heaven | Influence | Justice | Light | Order | Peace | Truth | Blessed |

J. B. Bury, fully John Bagnell Bury

If there were a good cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2100 the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically disappear.

Cause | Doctrine | Earth | Good | Meaning | Progress |

Albert Einstein

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore.

Earth | Knowing |

L. Francis Edmunds

According to the laws of probability, the time it would take to produce a single molecule of a moderate degree of dissymmetry on a globe the size of the earth would be about 10243 Billions of years, whereas by the most recent calculations, based on radioactivity, the earth is estimate to have been in existence for only 2 billion years… the properties of a cell are born out of the co-ordination of complexity and not out of the chaotic complexity not out of the chaotic complexity of a mixture of gases. This transmissible, hereditary, continuous co-ordination entirely escapes our laws of chance.

Chance | Earth | Existence | Size | Time |