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

Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself… not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps trans-humanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature… I believe in trans-humanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.

Belief | Destiny | Enough | Existence | Human nature | Humanity | Individual | Man | Nature | Need | People | Will | Wishes |

Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL

I believe the purpose of life is happiness. In today’s world being happy is inseparable from being responsible. We need to temper the extremes of our personal nature so that we can realize oneness with the universe. We must keep our destructive qualities from outweighing our constructive qualities.

Happy | Life | Life | Nature | Need | Oneness | Purpose | Purpose | Qualities | Temper | Universe | World |

John Koster

Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.

Atheism | History | Machines | Man | Men | Need | People | Thinking | Universe | Learn | Think |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Aggression | Love | Mankind | Method | Need | Oppression | Retaliation | Revenge | Time |

Paul Wilhelm von Keppler, Bishop of the Diocese of Rottenburg

Joy is a constituent of life, a necessity of life; it is an element of life’s value and life’s power. As every man has need of joy, so too, every man has a right to joy… It is a condition of religious living.

Joy | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Need | Power | Right | Value |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nonviolence means that we will match your capacity to inflict pain with our capacity to endure it… We have the choice in this world today between nonviolence and nonexistence.

Capacity | Choice | Means | Pain | Will | World |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.

Choice |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me, and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness; that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then?

Alms | Enemy | Kindness | Need |

Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

A wise prince will seek means by which his subjects will always and in every possible condition of things have need of his government, and then they will always be faithful to him.

Government | Means | Need | Will | Wise |

Abraham Lincoln

If all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.

Government | Men | Need |

George S. Merriam

No one who is fit to live need fear to die... To us here, death is the most terrible word we know. But when we have tasted its reality, it will mean to us birth, deliverance, a new creation of ourselves.

Birth | Death | Fear | Need | Reality | Will |

John Macmurray

In all enjoyment there is a choice between enjoying the other and enjoying yourself through the instrumentality of the other. The first is the enjoyment of love, the second is the enjoyment of lust. When people enjoy themselves through each other, that is merely mutual lust.

Choice | Enjoyment | Love | Lust | People |

Abraham Lincoln

The will of God prevails. In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same things at the same time.

God | Time | Will | Wrong | God |

Carl Wallace Miller

To the reverent scientist… the simplest features of the world about us are in themselves so awe-inspiring that there seems no need to seek new and greater miracles as evidences of God’s care.

Awe | Care | God | Miracles | Need | World |

Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch

Whatever news we get about the scans, I’m not going to die when we hear it. I won’t die the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. So today, right now, well this is a wonderful day. And I want you to know how much I am enjoying it… That’s the way the rest of my life would need to be lived.

Day | Life | Life | Need | News | Rest | Right |

Wayne Muller

Proximity to death wakes us up. Death dispels the most potent illusion about life – that it belongs to us, and that we have all the time to we need to arrange it the way we want. But in many ways it is a gift that our life is limited, impermanent. We hold it more dear because this is so.

Death | Illusion | Life | Life | Need | Time |

Janet H. Murray

One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing.

Art | Beauty | Invention | Need | Novels | Reading | Television | Art | Beauty | Understand |