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

John Henry Newman

Growth is the only evidence of life.

Evidence | Growth | Life | Life |

John Milton

There can be no doubt but that everything in the world, by the beauty of its order, and the evidence of a determinate and beneficial purpose which pervades its, testifies that some supreme efficient Power must have pre-existed, by which the whole was ordained for a specific end.

Beauty | Doubt | Evidence | Order | Power | Purpose | Purpose | World | Beauty |

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

The thoughts we think of and the things we make are under our control, that we can manipulate them at will. The evidence seems to suggest the contrary. The information we generate has a life of its own, and its existence is sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, relative to ours.... It doesn’t seem that memes are any more dependent on their environment than we are.

Control | Evidence | Existence | Life | Life | Will | Think |

Nathaniel Branden

There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity.

Esteem | Evidence | Generosity | Kindness | Respect | Self | Self-esteem | Will |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.

Evidence | Immortality |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.

Evidence | Immortality |

René Descartes

We should never allow ourselves to be persuaded excepting by the evidence of our Reason, of our Reason and not our imagination nor of our senses.

Evidence | Imagination | Reason |

Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken

The highest and most profitable learning is the knowledge of ourselves. To have a low opinion of our own merits, and to think highly of others, is an evidence of wisdom. All men are frail, but thou shouldst reckon none so frail as thyself.

Evidence | Knowledge | Learning | Men | Opinion | Wisdom | Think |

Christopher Hitchens

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Evidence |

Edward FitzGerald, fully Edward Marlborough FitzGerald

Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe. If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe that he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple; and you can't expect greater complaisance than that to be sure.

Evidence | God | Reason | Will | Woman | God |

Edward R. Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

Age | Dissent | Evidence | Fear | History | Men | Will |

Felix Frankfurter

Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth.

Coercion | Evidence | Guilt | System | Following |

Ervin László

In the conservative view human communication and interaction is limited to our sensory channels ... [but] we are linked by more subtle and encompassing connections as well...The connections that bind 'my' consciousness to the consciousness of others... are rediscovered today in controlled experiments with thought and image transference, and the effect of the mind of one individual on the body of another... Native tribes seem able to communicate beyond the range of eye and ear... In the laboratory also, modern people display a capacity for spontaneous transference of impressions and images, especially when they are emotionally close to each other... transpersonal contact includes the ability to transmit thoughts and images, and ... it is given to many if not all people... this is the finding of recent experiments... Reliable evidence is becoming available that the conscious mind of one person can produce repeatable and measurable effects on the body of another... [also] Intercessory prayer and spiritual healing, together with other mind- and intention-based experiments and practices, yield impressive evidence regarding the effectiveness of telepathic and telesomatic information- and energy-transmission. The pertinent practices produce real and measurable effects on people, and they are more and more widespread. But mainstream science has no explanation for them. Could it be that our consciousness is linked with other consciousnesses through an interconnecting Akashic Field, much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos, quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living?

Ability | Body | Capacity | Consciousness | Display | Evidence | Individual | Mind | People | Prayer | Science | Thought | World | Thought |

Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology — we are quite unable to imagine the contrary.

Consciousness | Evidence |

Ervin László

The overall idea behind the concept of an Akashic Field is that behind the materialistic and mechanistic world there is in fact another realm of interaction. This book presents compelling evidence for this from the fields of cosmology, quantum physics, biology and studies of consciousness. It is like a subtle communication network that underlies physical reality and that connects every point in space with every other point, and every thing with every other thing. This communication network operates in the realm of pure information that underlies empirical existence and thus does not rely on the transport of physical energy, hence, through this field, interactions can occur instantaneously regardless of physical separation and without any channel for the mechanistic transport of energy. Furthermore, like things tend to interact more strongly with like things, thus humans interact more strongly with humans, galaxies with galaxies and so on. The principle empirical and observable effect of this field is coherence between phenomena across any distances.

Evidence | Existence | Phenomena | Reality | Space | World |

Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Evidence | Good | Truth |

Frank Tyger

There is no evidence that the tongue is connected to the brain.

Evidence |

Freeman John Dyson

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

Evidence | Sense | Universe |

Freeman John Dyson

The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. This is the confession of faith of a scientific heretic. Perhaps I may claim as evidence for progress in religion the fact that we no longer burn heretics.

Beginning | Diversity | Evidence | Faith | Life | Life | Progress | Religion | Universe |

Norman Douglas, aka George Norman Douglas

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

Evidence | Mind | Trust |