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

Yechezkail Levenstein

The commandment to love the Almighty requires that we should be willing to give up our lives if necessary out of love for Him. If a person has internalized that in reality he is a soul and his body is merely an outer garment that he temporarily wears, he will find it relatively easy to fulfill the commandment of giving up his life is need be. He does not feel as if he is sacrificing himself for he always retains his soul. His body which he is sacrificing is not himself but only an outer garment. For such a person giving up his life is not the ultimate sacrifice since his body is not an integral part of his identity.

Body | Character | Giving | Life | Life | Love | Need | Reality | Sacrifice | Soul | Will |

Ronald E. Osborn

When the taste is purified, the morals are not easily corrupted. Whatever injures the body, the morals, or the mind, will lessen or vitiate taste; thus, disorders of the body and violent passions of the mind, will do this, and so will also excessive care or covetousness; but above all, a habit of intemperance, and keeping low company will greatly deprave that which was once a good taste.

Body | Care | Character | Good | Habit | Intemperance | Mind | Taste | Will |

Plotinus NULL

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-centered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever in the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Beauty | Body | Character | Life | Life | Order | Self | Soul |

Plotinus NULL

Memory, in point of fact, is impeded by the body: even as things are, addition often brings forgetfulness; with thinning and clearing away, memory will often revive. The soul is stability; the shifting and fleeting thing which body is can be a cause only of its forgetting not of its remembering - Lethe stream may be understood in this sense - and memory is a fact of the soul.

Body | Cause | Character | Forgetfulness | Memory | Sense | Soul | Will |

William Penn

Love labor: for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayest for physic. It is wholesome for the body and good for thy mind.

Body | Character | Good | Labor | Love | Mind |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A feeble body weakens the mind.

Body | Character | Mind |

Winfred Rhoades, fully Winfred Chesney Rhoades

Not the state of the body but the state of mind and soul is the measure of the well-being of each of us.

Body | Character | Mind | Soul |

Logan Pearsall Smith

We grow with the years more fragile in body but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Body | Character | Conscience |

Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Dalden Jenkins

Our bodies and egos are vehicles by which we can access the experience of physical living. As a key ingredient in an automobile is its driver, so the key ingredient in a person is soul. Without active alignment to soul - a person is lost - the fundamental meaning of life is missing. Planet Earth is a sort of “soul-field”, a body of experience with a characteristic flavor, which individual souls enter to learn, evolve and serve. Perhaps it is a Hall of Mirrors at a fairground, where we see ourselves reflected, expanded and compressed in so many different ways.

Body | Character | Earth | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul |

Charles Simmons

Impure thoughts awaken impure feelings, lead to impure expressions, and beget impure actions, and these lead to imbecility both of body and mind, and to the ruin of all that is noble and pure in character.

Body | Character | Feelings | Mind |

Logan Pearsall Smith

The lusts and greeds of the Body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.

Body | Character | Soul |

Gordon-Michael Scallion

All life is initiation. Each experience, each act, deed, especially thoughts, are a portion of initiation. Initiation then is the process whereby the entity - the soul force, is given the opportunity to develop spiritually. This means, that when the soul chooses to improve itself - to move towards a greater light, the soul body so changes its vibration as to remove from its spiritual fabric those attachments detrimental to its path upward.

Body | Character | Experience | Force | Life | Life | Light | Means | Opportunity | Soul |

Avraham-Haim Shag, born Avraham-Haim Tzvebner

There is no greater fool than one who makes his happiness based on receiving honor and approval. Such a person’s happiness is always in the hands of others... Such a person is dependent on other people his enter life and will frequently suffer humiliation. Only an idiot would knowingly and willingly put himself in a situation where he will constantly be in need of others and will humiliate himself for a dubious and questionable benefit.

Character | Honor | Life | Life | Need | People | Will | Happiness |

John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury

No man’s body is as strong as his appetites, but Heaven has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities.

Body | Character | Heaven | Man | Strength |

John P. Webster

The chiefest action for a man of spirit is never to be out of action; the soul was never put into the body to stand still.

Action | Body | Character | Man | Soul | Spirit |

George Matthew Adams

Tension is a killer! Just relax and note the immediate effect. One of peace and ease of mind. One in which every organ of the body joins. In relaxation there is unity of mind, body and spirit.

Body | Mind | Peace | Spirit | Unity | Wisdom |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

The soul is of itself, all verges to it, all has reference to what ensures, all that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence, not a move can a man or woman make, that affects him or her in a day, month, any part of the direct lifetime, or the hour of death, but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The indirect is just as much as the direct, the spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body, if not more.

Body | Character | Day | Death | Man | Soul | Spirit | Woman |

John Armstrong

There is, they say, (and I believe there is), a spark within us of th’ immortal fire, that animates and moulds the grosser frame; and when the body sinks, escapes to heaven; its native seat, and mixes with the gods.

Body | Heaven | Wisdom |

Horace Traubel

Death fills me with its abundance. What is this flood, overcoming body and sense? I feel the walls of my skull crack, the barriers part, the sun-flood enter - Love, lore, not lost, only magnified, floating eternal seas of essence - before and behind births and deaths, spiritual gravitation, the emergence ever-more expanding... O my questioner! you do not suspect me - you suspect yourself: to-morrow, seeing yourself, you will see me, and the illumined spirit, passing the portal, God-grown, will hail me proudly.

Abundance | Body | Character | Death | Eternal | God | Love | Sense | Spirit | Will |