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

Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.

Enough | Patience | Simplicity |

Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.

Confidence | Enough | Life | Life | Patience | Simplicity | Solitude |

Richard Dawkins

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.

God | Hypothesis | Simplicity | God |

Richard Dawkins

Darwinism is a remarkably simple theory, childlishly so, in comparison with almost all of physics and mathematics. But we have good reason for believing that this simplicity is deceptive. Simple as the theory may seem, nobody thought of it until Darwin and Wallace in the mid-19th century. How could such a simple idea go so long undiscovered by thinkers of the calibre of Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Hume and Aristotle? What was wrong with philosophers and mathematicians that they overlooked it?

Good | Reason | Simplicity | Thinkers | Thought | Wrong | Thought |

Robertson Davies

Our age has robbed millions of the simplicity of ignorance, and has so far failed to lift them to the simplicity of wisdom.

Age | Simplicity |

Robert James Turnbull

The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art.

Mathematics | Poetry | Simplicity |

Margaret Fuller, fully Sara Margaret Fuller, Marchese Ossoli

Mercury has cast aside The signs of intellectual pride, Freely offers thee the soul: Art thou noble to receive? Canst thou give or take the whole, Nobly promise and believe? Then thou wholly human art, A spotless, radiant, ruby heart, And the golden chain of love Has bound thee to the realm above. Guard thee from the power of evil; Who cannot trust, vows to the devil.

Beauty | Culture | Friend | Life | Life | Light | Prison | Simplicity | Spirit | Wealth | Beauty |

Sharafuddin Ahmad ibn Yahya Maneri, fully Hazrat Makhdum Shaikh Sharafuddin Yahya Maneri

Before your Unique Being, their is neither old nor new: Everything is nothing, nothing at all! Yet He is what He is. How then can we remain separate from You!

Belief | Concealment | God | Light | Man | Unity | Vision | God |

Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL

All these sensory means and exercises of the faculties must be left behind and in silence so that God Himself may affect the divine union of the soul. As a result one has to follow this method of disencumbering, emptying, and depriving the faculties of their natural rights and operations to make room for the inflow and illumination of the supernatural. If a person does not turn his eyes from his natural capacity, he will not attain to so lofty a communication; rather he will hinder it. If it is true that the soul must journey by knowing God through what He is not, rather than through what He is, it must journey, insofar as possible, by way of the denial and rejection of natural and supernatural apprehensions. This is our task now with the memory. We must draw it away from its natural props and capacities and raise it above itself (above all distinct knowledge and apprehensible possession) to supreme hope in the incomprehensible God. The annihilation of the memory in regard to all forms (including the five senses) is an absolute requirement for union with God. This union cannot be wrought without a complete separation of the memory from all forms that are not God. In great forgetfulness it is absorbed in a supreme good. Once he has the habit of union he no longer experiences these lapses of memory in matters concerning his moral and natural life. All the operations of the memory and other faculties in this state are divine.

Faith | Love | Progress | Purity | Reason | Sense | Simplicity | Soul | Will | Intellect |

Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL

The Lord said to Adam: Eat of every tree; do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He was able to eat of every tree of paradise since he did not sin as long as he did not go against obedience. For the person eats of the tree of knowledge of good who appropriates to himself his own will and thus exalts himself over the good things which the Lord says and does in him; and thus, through the suggestion of the devil and the transgression of the command, what he eats becomes for him the fruit of the knowledge of evil. Therefore it is necessary that he bear the punishment.

Lord | Simplicity | Truth | Will |

Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL

Ordinarily that which is of the greatest profit – namely, to be ever losing oneself and becoming as nothing – is considered the worst thing possible, and that which is of least worth, which is for the soul to find consolation and sweetness, is considered best. Secret contemplation is the science of love. It is an infused and loving knowledge of God, which enlightens the soul and at the same time enkindles it with love, until it is raised up step by step, even unto God its Creator. For it is love alone that unites and joins the soul with God.

Awareness | God | Knowing | Knowledge | Mind | Oblivion | Purity | Simplicity | Soul | Time | Will | God | Awareness | Think | Understand |

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux NULL

The obedience which we render to a superior is paid to God, Who says, ‘He that hears you hears Me;’ so that whatever he who holds the place of God commands, supposing it is not evidently contrary to God's law, is to be received by us as if it came from God Himself; for it is the same thing to know His Will, either from His Own, from an Angel's, or from a man's mouth.

Faith | Nothing | Reason | Sacred | Simplicity | Tears |

Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL

Law is twofold -- natural and written. The natural law is in the heart, the written law on tables. All men are under the natural law.

God | Simplicity | God |

Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL

Do as much as possible, and talk of yourself as little as possible.

Concealment | Light |

Simone Weil

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

Attention | Evil | Good | Law | Man | Necessity | Reality | Simplicity |

John Climacus, fully Saint John Climacus, aka John of the Ladder, John Scholasticus and John Sinaites

Humility is the only thing that no devil can imitate. If pride made demons out of angels, there is no doubt that humility could make angels out of demons.

Concealment | Simplicity |

Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Take care that the worldling does not pursue with greater zeal and anxiety the perishable goods of this world than you do the eternal.

Love | Simplicity | Will |

Stephan Jay Gould

Dawkins explicitly abandons the Darwinian concept of individuals as the units of selection: ‘I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity,’ Thus, we should not talk about kin selection and apparent altruism. Bodies are not the appropriate units. Genes merely try to recognize copies of themselves wherever they occur. They act only to preserve copies and make more of them. They couldn't care less which body happens to be their temporary home… Still, I find a fatal flaw in Dawkins' attack from below. No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing he cannot give them — discrete visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favors some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold.

Behavior | Better | Simplicity |

Stephanie Mills

I'd like to think that the tenets of deep ecology are part of human consciousness by dint of the fact that we evolved, co-evolved with entire biotic communities. My hope would be that the philosophy of deep ecology, variously expressed or experienced, might strike resonant chords, or maybe send a thrill of recognition up and down one's spinal cord. The dominant culture is utterly antithetical to deep ecology, and planetary ecosystems are now so distorted, for the most part, that deep ecology's ground of being is threatened, and to think about the world in a deep ecological mode is threatening. Threatening, in a sense, to the thinker because the moral implications are deeply unsettling, and threatening to the anthropocentric world view.

Beauty | Means | Simplicity | Truth | Beauty | Think |