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

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Body | Character | Consistency | Life | Life | Mind | Nature | People |

Anna Jameson

It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

Character | Courage | Man | Mind | Poverty | Struggle |

William James

My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

Character | Experience | Mind |

William James

The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on.

Attention | Character | Consciousness | Mind | Rest | Suppression |

David Hume

Nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are only the inlets, through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object... The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objects. The supposition of such a connection is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.

Character | Experience | Mind | Nothing | Object | Perception | Present |

Pinchos Hurwitz

“What thoughts were going through your mind when you received so much honor?” “I imagined that it was my funeral procession and the people were escorting me to the cemetery. This prevented me from feeling arrogant.”

Character | Honor | Mind | People |

William James

There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors... Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways... Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Character | Education | Genius | Ideas | Little | Means | Mind | Struggle | Truth | Old |

Washington Irving

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

Character | Good nature | Good | Heaven | Mind | Nature | Thought |

Yosef Y. Hurwitz

Many people are mistaken about how they can improve their situation. They think they will have peace of mind only when they have obtained everything they desire. But this is erroneous. Gratifying desires does not bring lasting satisfaction. The only path to achieve satisfaction is to stop desiring more things. As long as a person is unable to control his desiring, his problems will not be overcome... The only way to find real satisfaction in life is to stop desiring what is beyond your reach.

Character | Control | Desire | Life | Life | Mind | Peace | People | Problems | Will | Think |

Huang Po, also Huángbò Xīyùn

Do not build up your views upon your senses and thoughts, do not base your understanding upon you senses and thoughts; but at the same time do not seek the Mind away from your senses and thoughts, do not try to grasp Realty by rejecting your senses and thoughts. When you are neither attached to, nor detached from, then, then you enjoy your perfect unobstructed freedom, then you have your seat of enlightenment.

Character | Enlightenment | Freedom | Mind | Time | Understanding |

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Self-knowledge brings tranquillity to the mind, and then only can truth come into being. Truth cannot be sought after. Truth is the unknown, and that which you seek is already known. Truth comes into being unsought when the mind is without prejudice, when there is the understanding of the whole process of ourselves.

Character | Knowledge | Mind | Prejudice | Self | Self-knowledge | Tranquility | Truth | Understanding |

Ya’akov Dov "Katzele" Katz

A person’s first obligation is to work on having an orderly mind and to decide on what thoughts he will think about.

Character | Mind | Obligation | Will | Work | Think |

Justin Martyr, aka Saint Justin

By examining the tongue, physicians find out the diseases of the body; and philosophers, the diseases of the mind and heart.

Body | Character | Heart | Mind | Wisdom |

B. C. Kher

Both the saint and the scientist must possess the same qualities in order to attain their ideals. But these qualities are selfless devotion, a meticulous love of truth, infinite patience, thoroughness, and a depth of mind which does not resent criticism. Without these qualities neither of the two can reach his goal. It is my firm belief that the goal which both science and religion reach by different routes is one and the same.

Belief | Character | Criticism | Devotion | Ideals | Love | Mind | Order | Patience | Qualities | Religion | Science | Truth |