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

Jeremy Taylor

Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner of his joy; a friend shares my sorrow and makes it but a moiety, but he swells my joy and makes it double.

Friend | Joy | Man | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Joel Elias Spingarn

To let one's self go - that is what art is always aiming at.

Art | Self | Wisdom | Art |

O. J. Simon

Faith, love and sorrow are three elements that mysteriously blend in human experience, each having its own tale to tell of the relation which we bear to the Supreme Being.

Experience | Faith | Love | Sorrow | Wisdom |

William Gilmore Simms

Not to sorrow freely is never to open the bosom to the sweets of the sunshine.

Sorrow | Wisdom |

George Szell, originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell

Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels the brain.

Heart | Music | Thinking | Unity | Wisdom |

Union Prayer Book NULL

To brood over our sorrow is to embitter our grief.

Grief | Sorrow | Wisdom |

Lyall Watson

The biological origins of awareness... Contact, communication and recognition all take place at a very simple level - occurring even amongst social bacteria that seem to be able to recognise self from non-self.

Awareness | Self | Wisdom |

Haku'un Ryoko Yasutani, aka Yasutani Roshi

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to supposed that I am here and you are out there.

Delusion | Humanity | Wisdom |

Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

There is no happiness without security- I mean the prospect of being able to rely on the permanence of a state into which one has settled oneself. This assurance is to be found either in the mastering of things, or in the mastering of self which makes one independent of things.

Security | Self | Happiness |

Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is not more than the soul, and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, and whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, and I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, and to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, and there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, and there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe, and I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, for I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is sign'd by God's name, and I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Better | Body | God | Learning | Man | Men | Nothing | Object | Peace | Self | Soul | Sympathy | Will | Wisdom | Following | God | Understand |

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 |