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

Ellen Goodman

For most Americans the sexual revolution was not a vast national orgy of swingers. There was never widespread approval of adultery or promiscuity. The revolution - evolution is a better word - appeared rather as a massive questioning of the double standard and the sexual constraints we grew up with.

Adultery | Better | Character | Evolution | Promiscuity | Revolution | Approval |

Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos

Nothing impedes our evolution more surely than our inability to forgive.

Character | Evolution | Nothing |

Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wise, more liberated and luminous state of being. Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit to it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy.

Character | Ecstasy | Evolution | Force | Mission | Mystical | Purpose | Purpose | Wise |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict.

Doubt | Effort | Energy | Evolution | Life | Life | Power | Will | Wisdom | Work | World |

Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett

You have to live on twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness - the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends! - depends on that!

Evolution | Health | Money | Pleasure | Respect | Right | Soul | Time | Wisdom | Happiness |

Gotthard Booth

Love means that the adults be genuinely concerned with the evolution of the true nature of the child. Children are not able to respond to a love which tries to fashion them according to the concept of the adult, no matter how good the latter's intention may be.

Children | Evolution | Good | Intention | Love | Means | Nature | Wisdom |

Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel

Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of "being and becoming"! That is the broad lesson of the evolution of the world... The belief in the freedom of the will is inconsistent with the truth of evolution. Modern philosophy shows clearly that the will is never really free in man or animal, but determined by the organization of the brain; and that in turn acquires its individual character by the laws of heredity and the influence of environment.

Belief | Change | Character | Evolution | Existence | Freedom | Heredity | Individual | Influence | Lesson | Man | Nothing | Organization | Philosophy | Truth | Will | Wisdom | World |

Edward Hoagland, fully Edward Morley Hoagland

Any careful study of living things, whether wolves, bears or man, reminds one of the same direct truth; also of the clarity of the fact that evolution itself is obviously not some process of drowning being clutching at straws and climbing from suffering and trail and virtual expiration to tenuous, momentary survival. Rather, evolution has been a matter of days well-lived, chameleon strength, energy, zappy sex, sunshine stored up, inventiveness, competitiveness, and the whole fun of busy brain cells.

Energy | Evolution | Fun | Man | Strength | Study | Suffering | Survival | Truth | Wisdom |

Gloria D. Karpinski

Change challenges, relieves, frustrates, threatens, saddens or exhilarates us. Mainly it forces us to grow. It is the mechanism through which nature ensures evolution and the way God calls us home. It scares away our illusions about ourselves and others.

Change | Evolution | God | Nature | Wisdom | God |

Lynn Margulis

Our own role in evolution is transient and expendable in the context of the rich layer of interliving beings forming the planet's surface... Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.

Evolution | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL

Salvation and justice are not to be found in revolution, but in evolution through concord. Violence has ever achieved only destruction, not construction; the kindling of passions, not their pacification; the accumulation of hate and destruction, not the reconciliation of the contending parties; and it has reduced men and parties to the difficult task of building slowly after sad experience on the ruins of discord.

Evolution | Experience | Hate | Justice | Men | Reconciliation | Revolution | Salvation | Wisdom |

Naima Jody Sherwood

Metaphysically, the world has three levels: physical, spiritual and mystical. We find life’s meaning at each level. What gives life meaning is sharing - sharing bread, babies, moments, death, celebrations. It is recognizing that there is no separation between human beings or between human beings and the evolution of the world. Subconsciously and consciously, we are constantly expressing the fact that we are divine.

Death | Evolution | Life | Life | Meaning | Mystical | Wisdom | World |

Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

A species does not live within its environment; it interacts with it. Over a period of time a species can interact so violently that the changes it catalyzes can cause it to change dramatically--even to die out. Scientists estimate that 90% of the life forms that have inhabited our planet are now extinct. From the earliest single-cell life form to the human animal, all have interacted with the environment. All have created problems for themselves. All have been agents of evolutionary change. All have experienced evolution through cataclysm.

Cause | Change | Evolution | Life | Life | Problems | Time | Wisdom |

Carol Adrienne

Our personal question about our life’s purpose may very well be the tip as well as the foundation of the collective iceberg – part of the much larger question of where do we go from here? If we consider these individual longings in light of systems thinking, perhaps we can see them, not as isolated, narcissistic musings, but as equivalent to the DNA of our soul, the generative driver of evolution itself.

Evolution | Individual | Life | Life | Light | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Soul | Thinking |

Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney

Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth.

Art | Earth | Evolution | Individual | Love | Man | Means | Survival | Unique | Woman | Art |

Joe Boot

Punctuated equilibria [is] the abrupt appearance of life everywhere in the fossil record… suggest evolution has taken place in major creative episodes in different times and place, but with huge periods of stability in between. New species, then, have formed in those episodes during thousands rather than millions of years. This is often called the “lucky monster” theory.

Appearance | Evolution | Life | Life |

L. Francis Edmunds

The chromosome reproduces itself exactly and exactly once, building itself up from materials around it, mostly proteins. Nothing similar has been known to occur outside living matter, though regarded chemically, the DNA molecule is not fundamentally different from any other large molecule. Clearly then, some other principle prevails in living nature… Consider the DNA molecule… the main constituent of the chromosomes, with its 10,000 links, in which four different types occur in various arrangements… and assuming 32 links of the chain contain 8 of each type we get for the odds of a particular arrangement 1:1017 That is, one to a hundred thousand billion… the inevitable conclusion sis that whatever evolution may depend on, it certainly does not depend on chance.

Chance | Evolution | Inevitable | Nature | Nothing |

George Alonzo Coe

The whole of evolution is, in reality, a process of self-realizing a moral purpose; the correlation of mind and brain is just the phenomenal aspect of the real correlation of our mind with the divine power which sustains us.

Evolution | Mind | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Self |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

If practically everything in one’s life depends on the evolution of the level of one’s consciousness, it would seem that, aside from the mere survival needs, developing the level of consciousness would eclipse all other endeavors in importance. That would seem to be so, but that has to be integrated into the overall context of one’s life. Endeavors and activities can remain the same but need to be recontextualized and repositioned within a spiritual framework. To spiritualize one’s life, it is necessary only to shift one’s motive. To constantly be aware of one’s actual motive tends to bring up positionality and the pairs of opposites, such as gain versus service or love versus greed.

Consciousness | Evolution | Greed | Life | Life | Love | Need | Service | Survival |