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

Albert Schweitzer

We will never comprehend why the infinite will, in order to realize its completion, requires the incomplete, or how evil can result in good. No forced attempt to reason out these events can give us peace of God. There is a different way, a way born from inward experience. We may not have been given the privilege of understanding how events are expressing the will of God. But one thing we do know, and on that knowledge all else depends – the will of God is directed only toward one thing: the spiritual.

Events | Evil | Experience | God | Good | Knowledge | Order | Peace | Reason | Understanding | Will | God | Privilege |

Ralph Waldo Trine

No disease can enter into or take hold of our bodies unless it finds therein something corresponding to itself which makes it possible. And in the same way, no evil or undesirable condition of any kind can come into our lives unless there is already in them that which invites it and so makes it possible for it to come. the sooner we begin to look within ourselves for the cause of whatever comes to us, the better it will be, for so much sooner will we begin to make conditions within ourselves such that only good may enter.

Better | Cause | Disease | Evil | Good | Will |

Muhammed al-Taqī or Muhammad al-Jawād, given name Muhammad ibn ‘Alī ibn Mūsā

He who accuses another of being an evil person says so because he is afraid of him.

Evil | Afraid |

Jeremy Taylor

This day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow. But if we look abroad and brings into one day's thoughts the evil of many, certain and uncertain, what will be and what will never be, our load will be as intolerable as it is unreasonable.

Day | Evil | Will |

Gerald Vann

Temperance is not the absence of passion, but is the transfiguring of passion into wholeness. Without it... you will have the senses usurping sovereignty and excluding the spirit; you will have them deciding good and evil and excluding God.

Absence | Evil | God | Good | Passion | Spirit | Wholeness | Will |

Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

Progress towards the welfare of mankind is made not by the persecutors but by the persecuted… Only goodness, meeting evil and not infected by it, conquers evil.

Evil | Mankind | Progress |

Ralph Waldo Trine

Many will receive great help, and many will be entirely healed by a practice somewhat after the following nature: Wit a mind at peace, and with a heart going out in love to all, go into the quiet of your own interior self, holding the thought - I am one with the Infinite Spirit of Life, the life of my life. I then as spirit, I a spiritual being, can in my own real nature admit of no disease. I now open my body, in w2hich disease has obtained a foothold, I open it fully to the inflowing tide of this Infinite Life, and it now, even now, is pouring in and coursing through my body, and the healing process is going on. Realize this so fully that you begin to feel a quickening and a warming glow imparted by the life forces to the body. Believe the healing process is going on. Believe it, and hold continually to it. Many people greatly desire a certain thing but expect something else. They have greater faith in the power of evil than in the power of good, and hence they remain ill.

Body | Desire | Disease | Evil | Faith | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Nature | Peace | People | Power | Practice | Quiet | Receive | Self | Spirit | Thought | Will | Wit | Following | Thought |

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

Ambition | Evil | Fortune | Men |

Al Gore, Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr.,

What makes the United States special in the history of nations is our commitment to the rule of law and our carefully constructed system of checks and balances. Our national distrust of concentrated power and our devotion to openness and democracy are what have led us as a people to consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations.

Commitment | Democracy | Devotion | Distrust | Evil | Good | History | Law | Nations | Openness | People | Power | Rule | System |

Albert Einstein

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

Capitalism | Evil | Future | Success | System | Worship |

James R. Flynn, aka Jim Flynn

offers the image of a chariot in which the driver uses an obedient lead horse to control another wayward horse; that is, cool reason may know the Good but cannot control the passions without a passionate ally - without a spirit that loves the Good and greets evil with moral indignation.

Control | Evil | Good | Indignation | Reason | Spirit |

Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.

Evil | Man | Men | Nature | Power | World |