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

H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.

Man | Mind | Necessity | Wisdom |

Alain Arias-Misson

The purpose of art is not a rarefied, intellectual distillate - it is life, intensified, brilliant life.

Art | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Art |

Robert Aitken, fully Robert Baker Aitken

The Buddha and all his successors warn us against intellectual structures that confine us to an artificial environment, and against concepts that smear over the living fact of things in themselves. Even the idea of the Buddha must be forgotten.

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali

I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.

Belief | Freedom | God | Heart | Self | God |

Hans Albrecht Bethe

If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.

Fighting | History | Ideals | War | Will |

Roger Baldwin, fully Roger Nash Baldwin

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.

Democracy | Enough | People | Rights |

Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev

Pain in the human world is the birth of personality, its fight for its own nature.

Birth | Nature | Pain | Personality | World |

J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown

Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist is likely to find that his suggestions have fallen on fertile soil so long as he delivers his message with an eye to the existing attitudes and intellectual level of his audience.

Blame | Enemy | Need | People |

Edwin Arthur Burtt

The mystic vision of God, or ecstasy of felt union with Him, is, to those who attain it, an affair of ravishing emotional intensity, of vivid intellectual illumination, and on both of these counts of supreme value.

Ecstasy | God | Vision |

Amilcar Cabral

Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into real improvement of living conditions.

Better | Children | Fighting | Future | Ideas | Improvement | Men | Order | Peace | People | Progress | Struggle | Words |

Stokely Carmichael

One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about.

Change | Influence |

J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown

Communism and Fascism or Nazism although poles apart in their intellectual content are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.

Authority | Personality | Pleasure |

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 |

Seymour Epstein

How well people manage their emotions determines how effectively they can use their intellectual ability.

Ability | Emotions | People |

Shakti Gawain

Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.

Cause | Evil | Light | Order |

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith is intellectual humility, devotion of the mind, a true offering, the finest feat the heart can perform.

Devotion | Faith | Heart | Humility | Mind |

David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins

That which is `provable’ is not Reality but perception or mentation only. Reality is subjective and knowable only by virtue of identity with the known. “Provables’ belong to the classification and level of limitation and are arbitrary abstractions whose sole `reality’ is merely the consequence of selection and identification. The phenomenal is not the same as the noumenal [understood by intellectual intuition without the aid of the senses – opposed to phenomenon.]

Aid | Intuition | Perception | Reality | Virtue | Virtue |

Stephen Hawking

Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories – the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of this century. The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe (that is the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million miles – the size of the observable universe). Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct.

Force | Phenomena | Size | Theories | Universe |