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

Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL

Who ever lives looking for pleasure only, his senses uncontrolled, immoderate in his enjoyments, idle and weak, the tempter will certainly overcome him, as the wind blows down a weak tree.

Character | Pleasure | Will |

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 |

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 |

Maurice Nicoll

The senses cleansed see all as ‘infinite and holy’.

Character |

Maurice Nicoll

Death is a fact in our natural reality - that is, in our sense-given experience of life - and as long as we cannot understand that we apprehend though the senses only a minute part of total existence and reality, we cannot escape from the violent effect of its suggestion.

Character | Death | Existence | Experience | Life | Life | Reality | Sense | Understand |

Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL

Suffering itself does not less afflict the senses than the anticipation of suffering.

Anticipation | Character | Suffering |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

The true religion commands us to put away all disquietude of heart, and agitation of mind, and also all commotions and tempests of the soul.

Agitation | Heart | Mind | Religion | Soul | Wisdom |

James Q. Wilson

To say that people have a moral sense is not the same thing as saying that they are innately good. A moral sense must compete with other senses that are natural to humans - the desire to survive, acquire possessions, indulge in sex, or accumulate power - in short, with self-interest narrowly defined. How that struggle is resolved will differ depending on our character, our circumstances, and the cultural and political tendencies of the day. But saying that a moral sense exists is the same thing as saying that humans, by their nature, are potentially good.

Character | Circumstances | Day | Desire | Good | Nature | People | Possessions | Power | Self | Self-interest | Sense | Struggle | Will |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories.

Day | Time | Wisdom |

Richard Baxter

Though selfishness hath defiled the whole man, yet sensual pleasure is the chief part of its interest, and therefore by the senses it commonly works, and these are the doors and the windows by which iniquity entereth the soul.

Man | Pleasure | Selfishness | Soul | Wisdom |

Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.

Absence | Better | Heart | People | Wisdom | Think |

Nicholas-Edme Rétif or Restif, aka Rétif de la Bretonne

The heart of youth is reached through the senses; the senses of age are reached through the heart.

Age | Heart | Wisdom | Youth | Youth |

Mary Baker Eddy

Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind, nor can the material senses bear reliable testimony on the subject of health.

Health | Mind | Wisdom |

Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Abstract | Evidence | Justify | Logic | Man | Truth | Wisdom |

Albert Einstein

How extraordinary is the situation of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without going deeper than our daily life, it is plain we exist for our fellow men, in the first place for those upon whose smiles and welfare our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally but to whose destinies we are bound by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.

Day | Life | Life | Men | Order | Sympathy | Wisdom | Happiness |

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words... Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonplace; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead. It is only because they are not used to taste of what is excellent that take generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they are new.

Day | Good | Little | Men | People | Spirit | Taste | Wisdom | Words |

William Harvey

Every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart, and there induces change from the natural constitution, in the temperature, the pulse and the rest, which impairing all nutrition in its source and abating the powers at large, it is no wonder that various forms of incurable disease in the extremities and in the trunk are the consequence, inasmuch as in such circumstances the whole body labors under the effects of vitiated nutrition and want of native heat.

Agitation | Body | Cause | Change | Circumstances | Disease | Fear | Heart | Hope | Influence | Mind | Pain | Pleasure | Rest | Wisdom | Wonder |

Mahlon Hoagland

It is often the scientist’s experience that he senses the nearness of truth when... connections are envisioned. A connection is a step toward simplification, unification. Simplicity is indeed often the sign of truth and a criterion of beauty.

Beauty | Experience | Simplicity | Truth | Wisdom |

Paul Hindemith

We all know the impression of a heavy flash of lightning in the night. Within a second's time we see a broad landscape, not only in its general outlines but with every detail. Although we could never describe each single component of the picture [Sign-mind task], we feel that not even the smallest leaf of grass escapes our attention. We experience a view, immensely comprehensive and at the same time immensely detailed, that we could never have under normal daylight conditions, if our senses and nerves were not strained by the extraordinary suddenness of the event. Compositions must be conceived in the same way.

Attention | Experience | Impression | Mind | Time | Wisdom |

Henry Norman Hudson

Imagination is the organ through which the soul within us recognizes a soul without us; the spiritual eye by which the mind perceives and converses with the spiritualities of nature under her material forms; which tends to exalt eve the senses into soul by discerning a soul in the objects of sense.

Imagination | Mind | Nature | Sense | Soul | Wisdom |