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

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

The Ego is not the primary center of Awareness….the Self is. The Shadow is not the primary center of awareness…the Self is. The ego is the reflecting witness. The unfoldment of a life is driven by the unconscious dynamics between Self...the Shadow…and the Ego. What the ego is aware of is mostly socialization attitudes, biases, preferences, and filtered perceptions. The Self is the only responsible agent for the entire mystery of one’s life. Free will of the Shadow or of the Ego is an illusion generated out of a limited awareness. When witnessing the Divine Play of one’s Life…best not to appropriate any of what is seen, revealed, or experienced as personal.

Consciousness | Deceit | Ego | Force | Guarantee | Life | Life | Little | Love | Soul | Time |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.

Contempt | Ideals | Looks | Revelation | Self | Sense | Soul | Strength | World |

W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

Experience the mystery of pain, open to it, allow it. When you do, the experience shifts. What basically generates pain is the defense against it.

Dreams | Journey | Life | Life | Majority | Perception | Soul | Wants | Will |

W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell: the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.

Art | Music | Soul | Spirit | World | Art |

William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim

Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage.

Soul | Truth |

Wallace Stevens

Lacustrine man had never been assailed by such long-rolling opulent cataracts, unless Racine or Bossuet held the like.

Music | Soul | Spirit |

Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn the boundaried love of country, being free of winds, and alien lands, and distances, Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers, pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost their privilege, and in the peddler's pack the curious treasures of their stock-in-trade, bossy and singular, the heritage of poetry and science, polished bright, thin with the rubbing of too many hands; myth, glamour, hazard, fables dim as age, faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair, wings, and great waters, and Promethean fire, man's hand to clasp, and Helen's mouth to kiss. Why then in little meadows hedge about a poet's pasture? shed a poet's cloak for fustian? cede a birthright, thus to map

Soul | Thought | Wills | Thought |

Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

In February, if the days be clear, the waking bee, still drowsy on the wing, will sense the opening of another year and blunder out to seek another spring.

Little | Soul |

Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson

Often on the painted stair, as I passed abstractedly, velvet footsteps, two and three, padded gravely after me. — There was nothing, nothing there, nothing there to see.

Life | Life | Necessity | Right | Soul | Truth |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.

Children | Love | Opportunity | Soul |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very we'll do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beasts lair was and then pulled the pistols foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger.

Argument | Effort | Light | Nothing | Soul | Time |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.

Body | Grave | Light | Little | Lust | Shame | Soul | Tenderness | World |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

I loved him as we always love for the first time; with idolatry and wild passion.

Cause | Cost | Soul |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.

Absurd | Justice | Mind | People | Religion | Sense | Soul | Understanding | Will | Wrong |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

It is new fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions.

Comfort | Soul |

Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.

Dreams | Prison | Soul |

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

Jealousy is the art of doing yourself more harm than others.

Experience | Love | Soul |

Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

Soul | Time | Title |

Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi

We may not know any more about football than most of the other coaches in the league, but if we can put everything we know together so it makes good basic sense and then drill-drill-drill it into them... that kind of coaching can make winners out of losers.

Hell | Nothing | Soul | Will |

Vimala Thakar

We have reached the point, however, where we no longer have the luxury to indulge in self-centered comfort and personal acquisition or to escape into religious pursuits at the cost of collective interests. For us there can be no escape, no withdrawal, no private arena in which we can turn our backs on the sorrows of humanity, saying, “I am not responsible. Others have created a mess; let them mend it.” The writing on the world’s wall is plain: “Learn to live together or in separateness you die!” The choice is ours.

Awareness | Love | Purity | Soul | Will | Wisdom | Awareness |