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

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

All propaganda messages tend to occur in three stages: the stage of drawing attention and arousing interest, the stage of emotional stimulation, and the stage of showing how tension thus created can be relieved (i.e., by accepting the speaker’s advice).

Advice | Attention | Propaganda |

Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Attention | Focus | Taste | Universe |

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 |

William Bridges, fully Sir William Throsby Bridges

Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.

Attention |

Emmet Fox

When you give your attention to anything, you are building that thing into your consciousness, for good or evil. When you are faced with some negative condition in your own life, the scientific way to handle it is to withdraw your attention form it by building the opposite into your subconscious, and when you have done this the undesirable thing falls away like an overripe fruit... Don’t tear away people’s crutches (or your own). When they are no longer needed they will fall away. Dissolve the need.

Attention | Consciousness | Evil | Good | Life | Life | Need | People | Will |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

It is not attention that the child is seeking but love.

Attention | Love | Child |

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 |

Os Guiness

Does your calculus of success include the bottom line of death, or are you mortgaging your future for the immediate and the short term? Have you been tranquilized by the trivial, or does your sense of life grow from a close attention to reality and time?

Attention | Death | Future | Life | Life | Reality | Sense | Success | Time |

Samuel Goldwyn

Don’t pay attention to the critics – don’t even ignore them!

Attention |

Georgia Harkness

The act of praying centers attention on the higher emotion, unifies the spirit, crystallizes emotions, clarifies the judgments, releases latent powers, reinforces confidence that what needs to be done can be done.

Attention | Confidence | Emotions | Spirit |

Robert Keable

The historical Jesus has a different category of sins from that of the Old Testament or of Paul or of ecclesiastical writers after him. The sins which occupied the attention of Jesus were hypocrisy, wordliness, intolerance, and selfishness. The sins which occupy the principal attention of the Church… are impurity, murder, the drinking of alcohol, swearing, the neglect of the Church’s services and ordinances.

Attention | Church | Hypocrisy | Intolerance | Murder | Neglect | Selfishness | Old Testament | Old |

John A. O’Brien

Religion floods our darkness with a divine light… Religion brings into the focus of attention the two supreme values - God and the human soul.

Attention | Darkness | Focus | God | Light | Religion | Soul | God |

Mordecai Finley

If you want to find out how well you are living up to your spiritual values and higher principles, pay close attention to how you behave in the middle of an argument or a tense moment involving someone you live with, work with, or are in love with.

Argument | Attention | Love | Principles | Work |

Maria Montessori

At particular epochs of their life, [children] reveal an intense and extraordinary interest in certain objects and exercises, which one might look for in vain at a later age… Such attention is not the results of mere curiosity; it is more like a burning passion. A keen emotion first rises from the depths of the unconscious, and sets in motion a marvelous creative activity in contact with the outside world, thus building up consciousness.

Age | Attention | Children | Consciousness | Curiosity | Life | Life | Passion | World |

Wayne Muller

Rather than attend to those things we love, we give the bulk of our attention instead to things that bring us harm.

Attention | Harm | Love |

Wayne Muller

Gratefulness arises naturally from this fertile balance of honoring both our sorrow and our joy. We name our sorrows so that we can bring care and attention to our wounds, so that we may heal. And at the same time we give thanks for the innumerable gifts and blessings bestowed upon us daily, lest we forget how rich we are.

Attention | Balance | Blessings | Care | Joy | Sorrow | Time |

Herbert Alexander Simon

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Attention | Need | Poverty | Wealth |

Baird T. Spalding

The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power.

Achievement | Attention | Circumstances | Destroy | Genius | Little | Mediocrity | Men | Nature | Power | Prison | Sense |