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

Jacques Maritain

Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit, it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being.

Creativity | Experience | Longing | Mystical | Nature | Poetry | Silence | Spirit | Wants | World |

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour.

Harmony | Music | Nothing | Poetry | Sound |

James Joyce

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

Age | Eternal | Looks | Poetry |

John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

Poetry |

Beverley Nichols, fully John Beverley Nichols

Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Poetry |

J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the world "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as dx/dt = K(d^2x/dy^2) much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plain man, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change.

Aesthetic | Change | Consideration | Law | Poetry | Prediction | Thought | Will | World | Thought |

José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

Poetry |

Joseph Campbell

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

Myth | Poetry |

Joseph Campbell

That is the arrogance of the kind of academic narrowness one too often sees; it is trapped in its own predictable prejudices, its own stale categories. It is the mind dulled to the poetry of existence. It’s fashionable now to demand some economic payoff from space, some reward to prove it was all worthwhile. Those who say this resemble the apelike creatures in 2001. They are fighting for food among themselves, while one separates himself from them and moves to the slab, motivated by awe. That is the point they are missing. He is the one who evolves into a human being; he is the one who understands the future.

Arrogance | Fighting | Mind | Poetry | Reward |

Karl Wilheim Friedrich Schlegel, later Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Poetry | Time |

L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

The poet takes us straight into the presence of things. Not by explanation, but by indication; not by exhausting its qualities, but by suggesting its value he gives us the object, raising it from the mire where it lies trodden by the concepts of the understanding, freeing it from the entanglements of all that “the intellect perceives as if constituting its essence.” Thus exhibited, the object itself becomes the meeting-ground of the ages, a centre where millions of minds can enter together into possession of the common secret. It is true that language is here the instrument with which the fetters of language are broken. Words are the shifting detritus of the ages; and as glass is made out of the sand, so the poet makes windows for the soul out of the very substance by which it has been blinded and oppressed. In all great poetry there is a kind of “kenosis” of the understanding, a self-emptying of the tongue. Here language points away from itself to something greater than itself.

Language | Object | Poetry | Soul | Words | Intellect | Value |

Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II

Evolution does not isolate us from the rest of the Kosmos, it unites us with the rest of the Kosmos: the same currents that produced birds from dust and poetry from rocks produce egos from ids and sages from egos.

Poetry | Rest |

L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Though science makes no use for poetry, poetry is enriched by science. Poetry “takes up” the scientific vision and re-expresses its truths, but always in forms which compel us to look beyond them to the total object which is telling its own story and standing in its own rights. In this the poet and the philosopher are one. Using language as the lever, they lift thought above the levels where words perplex and retard its flight, and leave it, at last, standing face to face with the object which reveals itself. Would not all we mean by “communication between mind and mind” be provided for if we suppose that common knowledge comes about, not from our explaining things to one another, but from things explaining themselves in the same terms to us all? Accepting the object as its own interpreter, as its own “medium of communication,” do we not begin to understand what is utterly dark on any other view, how it comes to pass that the resulting knowledge is a common possession?

Knowledge | Language | Mind | Object | Poetry | Science | Story | Thought | Vision | Words | Thought | Understand |

L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Philosophy resembles poetry in being an art for enforcing meditation, for driving the mind inwards until it sinks into its Object.

Art | Mind | Poetry | Art |

Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second, which acquires dignity by hearing of the things the eye has seen. If you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians had not seen things with your eyes you could not report of them in writing. And if you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and less tedious to be understood. And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting. Now which is the worse defect? to be blind or dumb? Though the poet is as free as the painter in the invention of his fictions they are not so satisfactory to men as paintings; for, though poetry is able to describe forms, actions and places in words, the painter deals with the actual similitude of the forms, in order to represent them. Now tell me which is the nearer to the actual man: the name of man or the image of the man. The name of man differs in different countries, but his form is never changed but by death.

Dignity | Invention | Man | Means | Men | Order | Poetry | Sense | Similitude | Story |

Lewis Thomas

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Computer | Growth | Poetry | Worry |

Louis Kronenberger

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

Advertising | Life | Life | Poetry | Trouble |

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches

As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you.

Body | Eccentricity | Life | Life | Malice | Mystery | Poetry | Understand |

Lyall Watson

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.

Better | Music | Nothing | Poetry | Space | Understanding |