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

The basic significance of all difficulty is that it reorients us from the external to the spiritual. the meaning and purpose of the world remain to a large extent inexplicable. but one thing is clear: the purpose of all events is spiritual.

Difficulty | Events | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom | World |

Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL

Prior events are causes of those following them, and in this manner all things are bound together with one another, and thus nothing happens in the world such that something else is not entirely a consequence of it and attached to it as a cause... From everything that happens something else follows depending on it by necessity as cause.

Cause | Events | Necessity | Nothing | Wisdom | World | Following |

Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann

It is just because no event can be past with respect to an eternal entity that an eternal entity cannot alter a past event. An omnipotent, omniscient, eternal entity can affect temporal events, but it can affect events only as they are actually occurring.

Eternal | Events | Past | Respect | Wisdom | Respect |

James Watson, fully James Dewey Watson

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles... [Science moves with][ the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

Adventure | Arrogance | Belief | Events | Play | Science | Spirit | Truth | Wisdom |

Joseph Whitfield

Now that man has again evolved to a point where he can make the transition into fourth dimensional consciousness, communication and contacts with extraterrestrial beings has greatly increased. The presence of extraterrestrials should be on of the most reassuring events that is taking place on Earth. Instead, it is often the cause of great fear and apprehension. Fear is born of ignorance. Were it not so, people would welcome their space brothers with open arms. All major governments have repeatedly received information to explain the ET presence. They have been ignored as the product of a deranged mind. At some point some one must come to the realization that the problem of the existence of spacecraft is not going to disappear because man officially refuses to recognize their presence.

Cause | Consciousness | Earth | Events | Existence | Fear | Ignorance | Man | Mind | People | Space | Wisdom |

Gregg Braden

The possibilities of our future are actually determined by collective choices in the present. The evidence simply states that the choice of many people, focused in a specific manner, has a direct and measurable effect on our quality of life. Quantum physics suggests that by redirecting our focus – where we place our attention – we bring a new course of events into focus while at the same time releasing an existing course of events that may no longer serve us.

Attention | Choice | Events | Evidence | Focus | Future | Life | Life | People | Present | Time |

Albert Einstein

The idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible.

Events | World |

Jacques Ellul

Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions… The propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy.

Enemy | Events | Nature | Purity | Time |

Owen Flanagan

Three claims: (1) Consciousness exists. There exist conscious mental states, events, and processes that have the property of being conscious. (2) Consciousness has depth, hidden structure, hidden and possibly multiple functions, and hidden natural and cultural history. Conscious mental states supervene on brain states. (3) Conscious mental states, processes, events – possibly conscious supervisory faculties, if there are any – are heterogeneous in phenomenal world. A theory of consciousness will in the end be part of a unified theory of the mind.

Consciousness | Events | History | Mind | Property | Will | World |

Emmet Fox

The food of events is thought. Your habitual thoughts nourish your conditions and cause them to increase and multiply. Fear thoughts, gloomy and critical thoughts, selfish thoughts, are the food of unhappiness, sickness, and failure. When you supply this food in abundance these things come into your life – because they seek their food. Thoughts of God, thoughts of kindness, of optimism, and good will, are the food of health, joy, and success; and if you furnish a bountiful supply of this food you will attract these things instead.

Abundance | Cause | Events | Failure | Fear | God | Good | Health | Joy | Kindness | Life | Life | Optimism | Success | Thought | Unhappiness | Will |

Owen Flanagan

Memory is intimately linked to identity. Who I am is importantly constituted by both the content of my memories and by the manner in which I remember things – by how I fit them into the narrative of my life and by the spin I put on the events I remember.

Events | Life | Life | Memory |

Robert Jastrow

When you study the history of life, and step back to look at this long history with the perspective of several hundred million years, you see a flow and direction in it - from the simple to the complex, from lower forms to higher, and always towards greater intelligence--and you wonder: can this history of events leading to man, with its clear direction, yet be undirected?

Events | History | Intelligence | Life | Life | Man | Study | Wonder |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

We live not only in time and space but also in the knowledge of God. The events in the world reflect in him, and all existence is coexistence with God. Time and space are not the limits of the world. Our life occurs here and in the knowledge of God.

Events | Existence | God | Knowledge | Life | Life | Space | Time | World |

Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley

The future must have as its basis the consciousness of sanctity in existence – in common things, in the events of human life, in the gradually comprehended interlocking whole revealed to the human desire for knowledge, n the benedictions of beauty and love, in the catharsis, the sacred purging, of the moral drama in which character is pitted against fate and even deepest tragedy may uplift the mind.

Beauty | Character | Consciousness | Desire | Events | Existence | Fate | Future | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Sacred | Tragedy | Fate | Beauty |

Sharon R. Kaufman

People do not define themselves directly through a chronology of life experiences. Rather, they define themselves through the expression of selected life experiences... people crystallize certain experiences into themes… considered building blocks of identity. Identity in old age – the ageless self – is founded on the present significance of past experience, the current rendering of meaningful symbols and events of a life.

Age | Events | Experience | Life | Life | Old age | Past | People | Present | Self | Old |

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman

Autobiographical memories are particularly prone to inaccuracy. Traumatic events embed memories in a powerful but somewhat fragmentary way. Neurological disorders and drugs can disrupt the brain’s ability to distinguish between true and false memories and beliefs. The brain perceives reality and transforms it into an extraordinary range of personal, ethical, and creative premises that we use to build meaning, value, spirituality, and truth into our lives.

Ability | Distinguish | Events | Meaning | Reality | Spirituality | Truth |