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

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

Age | Consciousness | Dreams | God | Wisdom | God |

D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts are the result of my dreams. It is very queer, but my dreams make conclusions for me. They decide things finally. I dream a decision. Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusion of my vague days and offer me them as dreams.

Decision | Dreams | Wisdom |

Robert Full

Act with a determination not to be turned aside by thoughts of the past and fears of the future.

Determination | Future | Past | Wisdom |

Rudyard Kipling

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;... If you can fill the unforgiving minute With Sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Dreams | Earth | Man | Wisdom | Worth | Think |

Walter Savage Landor

The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.

Music | Nothing | Past | Present | Wisdom |

J. Z. Knight, fully Judy Zebra Knight, born Judity Darlene Hampton

Mere survival has always been the surface, bottom-line surface for our existence... Survival alone does not ennoble us... True meaning... can be found in what we’ve yet to accomplish, in the realm of the unknown. We must resolve to look deep within, at the unrealized potential of our unevolved selves. Materially, the unknown is one vast nothingness; potentially, it is all things. The unknown within us is where all dreams, thoughts and genius are frozen. The act of searching to make known the unknown triggers the brain. It allows us to incorporate, in ourselves, a greater consciousness, lighting the way for our dreams to enact themselves. Although we seem small in comparison with the whole universe, we are equipped with the greatest cosmic hookup ever created: the human brain. The brain - linked unconsciously to the infinite mind where the unknown resides - only facilitates thoughts, it does not create it. In struggling to find the answer to why we exist, we awaken the infinite mind to the unknown, making known the unknown, bringing meaning to our existence and commonness to all.

Consciousness | Dreams | Existence | Genius | Meaning | Mind | Survival | Universe | Wisdom |

Charles Lamb

No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of bells (bells the music highest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve-month. All I have done or suffered, performed or neglected - in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight of a contemporary, when he exclaimed: “I saw the skirts of the departing year.” It is no more than what is sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking.

Heaven | Indifference | Mind | Music | Past | Sadness | Sound | Time | Wisdom | Worth | Old |

John Locke

Repentance is a hearty sorrow for our past misdeeds, and is a sincere resolution and endeavor, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. It does not consist in one single act of sorrow, but in doing works meet for repentance; in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ for the remainder of our lives.

God | Law | Obedience | Past | Power | Repentance | Resolution | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Amy Lowell, born Amy Lawrence Lowell

All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.

Books | Dreams | Wisdom | Words |

Charles Mackay

The old thoughts never die. Immortal dreams outlive their dreamers and are our for aye; no thought once form’d and utter’d can expire.

Dreams | Thought | Wisdom | Old | Thought |

Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.

Man | Obedience | Past | Time | Wisdom |

Stephen Mitchell

When does God create heaven and earth? In the beginning. And when is the beginning? At every moment. Dying to past and future, we are born into the creative Now. Beginner's mind is the mind of God.

Beginning | Earth | Future | God | Heaven | Mind | Past | Wisdom | God |

Henry Fairfield Osborn

We do not live to extenuate the miseries of the past nor to accept as incurable those of the present.

Past | Present | Wisdom |

Padmasamabhava, "The Lotus-Born", aka Guru Rinpoche "Precious Guru" or Lopon Rinpoche or Padum in Tibet NULL

If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.

Future | Life | Life | Past | Present | Wisdom |

Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

God is withdrawn from both ends of time, for his life is not Time, but Eternity, the archetype of time. And in Eternity there is no past and future, only present.

Ends | Eternity | Future | God | Life | Life | Past | Present | Time | Wisdom |

Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

I do not evolve, I am. In art there is neither past nor future. Art that is not in the present will never be.

Art | Future | Past | Present | Will | Wisdom | Art |