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

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form - no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space - ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold - the embers left from earlier fires, the sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; to frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns, with grass and flower and fruits and corn.

Appearance | Birth | Body | Force | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Object | Space | Time | Wisdom | World |

Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister

Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.

Abuse | Children | Commitment | Conscience | God | Individual | Law | Morality | Obedience | Sin | Soul |

Samuel Butler

That great Law of Nature, Self-Preservation.

Law | Nature | Self | Self-preservation |

James W. Douglass

Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and [as yet] undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?

Atomic bomb | Change | Energy | History | Law | Reality | Society | World | Society |

Father Cuthbert

Until a man realizes sin as the death of his own higher self and as a rebellion against the law of his true happiness, there is no true conversion of heart towards the higher life.

Death | Heart | Law | Life | Life | Man | Rebellion | Self | Sin |

L. Francis Edmunds

Evolution, with the advent of conscious man, ceases to rule by outer law; it becomes the inner law of man’s being and can only advance through his volition… Man must fight to prepare the advent of the spiritual being he is destined to become.

Evolution | Law | Man | Rule |

Nguyễn Du

Happiness or misfortune are prescribed by law of Heaven, but their source comes from ourselves.

Heaven | Law | Misfortune | Misfortune |

Emmet Fox

It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. There need be no unqualified evils. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson.

Law | Learning | Lesson | Misfortune | Need | Time | Tragedy |

Emmet Fox

The present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in five minutes or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life is to live in the present, and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment, and in the place where your body is now.

Attention | Body | Despair | Law | Life | Life | People | Present | Time |

Emmet Fox

What you think upon grows. Whatever you allow to occupy your mind you magnify in your own life. Whether the subject of your thought be good or bad, the law works and the condition grows. Any subject that you tend to keep out of your mind tends to diminish in your life, because what you do not use atrophies.

Good | Law | Life | Life | Mind | Thought | Think | Thought |

Emmet Fox

The law of the universe is thought first, and then expression; and never can this law be reversed.

Law | Thought | Universe | Thought |

James Frazer, aka James George Frazer

The old view that the principles of right and wrong are immutable and eternal is no longer tenable. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

Change | Eternal | Law | Little | Principles | Right | World | Wrong | Old |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

The moral law has its seat in the soul of man. Truth is within ourselves. There is an inmost center in us all where Truth abides in fullness.

Law | Man | Moral law | Soul | Truth |

Roy F. Harrod, fully Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod

The most basic law of economics, namely that one cannot get something for nothing.

Economics | Law | Nothing |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt.

Injustice | Injustice | Law |