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

Samuel Miller Hageman

Earth is but the frozen echo of the silent voice of God.

Earth | God |

J. Glenn Gray

We have become so preoccupied with power and control over nature that we have lost an important dimension of our being, the disposition of thankfulness, of commemoration, of perceiving and enjoying something for its own sake. Instead of viewing these immediate objects of our environment in terms of their own being, we have come to regard them solely in terms of what they are for us. And to such an exploitative mentality, nature’s own voice becomes mute. Approached as material merely, to be worked up and pressed into the service of a self-styled lord of creation, she contains no revelation and no blessing.

Control | Important | Lord | Nature | Power | Regard | Revelation | Self | Service | Thankfulness |

Granville Stanley Hall

The mother’s face and voice are the first conscious objects as the infant soul unfolds, and she soon comes to stand in the very place of God to her child.

God | Mother | Soul | God |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

In Reality, nothing requires explanation. Nothing is caused by anything else. Existence requires no explanation nor does it have any dependence on any other state or quality. This understanding is clarified by the realization that nothing in and of itself has any `meaning’. Therefore, neither does it have `purpose’. Everything is already complete and merely self-existent as its own self-identity.

Dependence | Existence | Meaning | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Self | Self-identity | Understanding |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency; remind us that God, too, has a voice in history.

Bible | Civilization | Complacency | God | History | Bible |

Jean Grou, fully Jean Nicholas Grou

It is love which is the voice of the heart. Love God and you will be always speaking to him.

God | Heart | Love | Will | God |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Religion declined not because it was refuted but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.

Authority | Compassion | Creed | Discipline | Faith | Habit | Love | Past | Religion | Worship | Crisis |

Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

The doctrine of original sin is a theological perversion of natural fact. It is a fact that all human beings begin life with an equipment of instincts, impulses, and desires, at war with one another and often out of harmony with the realities of eth physical, social, and spiritual world. Sin and the sense of sin will always be with us, to torture and weigh down; but… the religion of the future will try to prevent men’s being afflicted with the sense of sin, rather than encourage it, and then attempt to cure it.

Doctrine | Future | Harmony | Life | Life | Men | Religion | Sense | Sin | Torture | War | Will | World |

Irving L. Janis

[Groupthink] The dissenter was made to feel at home, providing he lived up to two restrictions: first, that he did not voice his doubts to outsiders and thus play into the hands of the opposition; and second, that he kept his criticisms within the bounds of acceptable deviation, not challenging any of the fundamental assumptions of the group’s prior commitments.

Deviation | Opposition | Play |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The conscience is… a brake, not a guide; a fence, not a way. It raises its voice after a wrong deed has been committed, but often fails to give us direction in advance of our actions.

Conscience | Wrong |

William James

What we need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.

Men | Need | War | Will |

Thomas Hobbes

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

Force | Fraud | War |

Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

Frugality may be termed the daughter of prudence, the sister of temperance, and the parent of liberty. Those that are extravagant will quickly become poor, and poverty will enforce dependence and invite corruption.

Corruption | Daughter | Dependence | Frugality | Liberty | Poverty | Prudence | Prudence | Will | Parent |

Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering. “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.

Conscience | Man | Opinion | Public | Right |

Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL

The source of peace is within us; so also the source of war. And the real enemy is within us, and not outside. The source of war is not the existence of nuclear weapons or other arms. It is the minds of human beings who decide to push the button and to use those arms out of hatred, anger or greed.

Anger | Enemy | Existence | Greed | Peace | War | Weapons |

Michael Kane

Anarchism is [not] synonymous with chaos. Translated from the Greek, anarchism means the absence of rulers, or orders – not of rules or order. Order emanates naturally from the free cooperation of persons in a community.

Absence | Cooperation | Means | Order |

Martin Luther King, Jr.

To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

Cooperation | Evil | Good | Obligation | System |