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

Michael Harner

The shaman typically experiences ineffable joy in what he sees, an awe of the beautiful and mysterious worlds that open before him... He is a self-reliant explorer of the endless mansions of a magnificent hidden universe. Finally, he brings back his discoveries to build his knowledge and help others.

Awe | Joy | Knowledge | Self | Universe | Wisdom |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is no more lovely worship of God than that for which no image is required, but which springs up in our breast spontaneously when nature speaks to the soul, and the soul speaks to nature face to face.

God | Nature | Soul | Wisdom | Worship | God |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Beauty | Soul | Wisdom | Beauty |

Heinrich Heine

Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, flowers, water and love. Of course, if the spectator be without the last, the whole will present but a pitiful appearance; and, in that case, the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, the trees are good for fuel, the flowers are classified by stamens, and the water is simply wet.

Appearance | Good | Love | Means | Nature | Present | Will | Wisdom |

Isaac Thomas Hecker

Religion is the answer to that cry of Reason which nothing can silence, that aspiration of the soul which no created thing can meet, that want of the heart which all creation cannot supply.

Aspiration | Heart | Nothing | Reason | Religion | Silence | Soul | Wisdom | Aspiration |

James Henry Leigh Hunt

Part of our good consists in the endeavor to do sorrows away, and in the power to sustain them when the endeavor fails, to bear them nobly, and thus help others to bear them as well.

Good | Power | Wisdom |

Paul G. Hoffman, fully Paul Gray Hoffman

It is a deep-seated belief on the part of almost all Americans that their success will be better assured as they help to build the success of others.

Belief | Better | Success | Will | Wisdom |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

In the whole range of human vision nothing is more attractive than to see a young man full of promise and of hope, bending all his energies in the direction of truth and duty and God, his soul pervaded with the loftiest enthusiasm, and his life consecrated to the noblest ends. To be such a young man is to rival the noblest and best of men in heroic valor.

Duty | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nothing | Promise | Soul | Truth | Vision | Wisdom | World |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples.

Good | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Soozi Holbeche

I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation.

Absolute | Acceptance | Age | Body | Choice | Coercion | Death | Enemy | Experience | Fear | Life | Life | Opportunity | People | Right | Sense | Soul | Thinking | Thought | Time | Understanding | Unique | Wisdom | Words | Thought |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Language is a solemn thing: it grows out of life - out of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness. Every language is a temple in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.

Language | Life | Life | Soul | Wants | Wisdom |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

The Perennial Philosophy... the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of immanent and transcendent Ground of being.

Knowledge | Man | Philosophy | Psychology | Reality | Soul | Wisdom | World |

Victor Hugo

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Body | Soul | Wisdom |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

We teach children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense of the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all men, is now a rare gift.

Awe | Children | Greatness | Men | Sense | Soul | Teach | Wisdom | Wonder |

Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger

The soul has, living apart from its corporeal envelope, a profound habitual meditation which prepares it for a future life.

Future | Life | Life | Meditation | Soul | Wisdom |

Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

We teach children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense of the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all men, is now a rare gift.

Awe | Children | Greatness | Men | Sense | Soul | Teach | Wisdom | Wonder |