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

John Ruskin

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Books | Life | Life | Quiet | Reading | Waste |

Joseph Addison

One of the most important, but one of the most difficult things to a powerful mind is to be its own master; a pond may lay quiet in a plain, but a lake wants mountains to compass and hold it in.

Important | Mind | Quiet | Wants |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

A society – the product of socialization – is made of spontaneous nurturing and love, while culture can be quiet hate, which can lead, sooner or later, to a child’s subtle or flagrant rebellion.

Culture | Hate | Love | Quiet | Rebellion | Society | Society |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

No media project succeeds based on “good news only” because good news does not trigger our alert system. Anything good indicates a safe space, the quiet background against which events can play out. The enculturated mind is cued to respond to the negative as a point of focus, which largely screens out or ignores a quiet stable base, and, because it sharpens and maintains our alert awareness, we actually begin to look for the negative.

Awareness | Events | Focus | Good | Mind | News | Play | Quiet | Safe | Space | System |

Kahlil Gibran

Love joins our present with the past and the future... Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods... Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from voiceless valleys... Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquillity of the soul in the depth of Eternity... And so, all who passed spoke of Love as the image of their hopes and frustrations, leaving it a mystery as before.

Body | Desire | Eternity | Existence | Future | Grave | Heart | Knowledge | Love | Men | Mystery | Past | Present | Quiet | Rest | Soul | Tranquility |

Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead as to its own. Such an one can do no deed however small but it is clothed with something of God’s power and authority.

Authority | God | Mind | Nothing | Power | Quiet | Self | Will | God |

Michael S. Josephson

Happiness is a kind of emotional resting place of quiet satisfaction with one's life.

Life | Life | Quiet |

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.

Genius | Little | Men | Quiet | Learn |

Robert Burton

What physic, what chirurgery, what wealth, favor, authority can relieve, bear out, assuage, or expel a troubled conscience? A quiet mind cureth all.

Authority | Conscience | Mind | Quiet | Wealth |

Ronald S. Miller

Perhaps more than any other single factor, the intimate alchemy between the healer and the patient helps mobilize the body's natural resources. The mere presence of a healer often evokes hope in the patient and an expectation of recovery. When the two people create a partnership based on compassion, trust, and shared decision-making, and when the relationship nurtures the patient's hope for a positive outcome, even seemingly incurable diseases sometimes go into remission.... insistently restoring the human heart to the practice of medicine. Rather than treating patients as disease processes, they risk bringing their full humanness to the therapeutic encounter. They not only call on their technological expertise, but on the inner qualities practiced by healers from time immemorial: patience, humility, compassion, and an ability to inspire and mobilize their patients' healing resources.

Ability | Alchemy | Body | Compassion | Decision | Disease | Expectation | Heart | Hope | Humility | Patience | People | Practice | Qualities | Relationship | Risk | Time | Trust | Expectation |

Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh

What thou givest after thy death, remember that thou givest it to a stranger, and most times to an enemy; for he that shall marry thy wife will despise thee, thy memory and thine, and shall possess the quiet of thy labors, the fruit which thou hast planted, enjoy thy love, and spend with joy and ease what thou hast spared and gotten with care and travail.

Care | Death | Despise | Enemy | Joy | Love | Memory | Quiet | Wife | Will |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

In the relation of master to slave the master does not make a point of the need that he has for the other; he has in his grasp the power of satisfying this need through his own action; whereas the slaver, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is quiet conscious of the need he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally urgent for both, it always works in favor of the oppressor and against the oppressed.

Action | Fear | Hope | Need | Power | Quiet |

Mahabharata or The Mahabharata NULL

One should forgive, under any injury. It hath been said that the continuation of the species is due to man’s being forgiving. Forgiveness is holiness; by forgiveness the universe is held together. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is quiet of mind. Forgiveness and gentleness are the qualities of the Self-possessed. They represent eternal virtue.

Eternal | Forgiveness | Gentleness | Man | Mind | Qualities | Quiet | Sacrifice | Self | Universe | Virtue | Virtue | Forgiveness |

Thomas Fuller

Thou must content thyself to see the world imperfect as it is. Thou wilt never have any quiet if thou vexest thyself because thou canst not bring mankind to that exact notion of things and rule of life which thou hast formed in thy own mind.

Life | Life | Mankind | Mind | Quiet | Rule | World |

Thomas Moore

True conversation is an interpenetration of worlds, a genuine intercourse of souls, which doesn’t have to be self-consciously profound but does have to touch matters of concern to the soul... Conversation may also relive us from the pressures of everyday activity and decision-making, opening us up to undisclosed levels of our experience. Soul resides in the overtones and undertones, not in the flat body of literal events. Conversation performs a pleasurable and gentle alchemy on experience, sublimating it into forms that can be examined. Experience itself takes wing from conversation... Conversation is the sex act of the soul, and as such it is supremely conducive to the cultivation of intimacy.

Alchemy | Body | Conversation | Cultivation | Decision | Events | Experience | Self | Soul |

William Shakespeare

A peace above all earthly dignities, A still and quiet conscience. The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Wolsey at III, ii)

Conscience | Life | Life | Peace | Quiet |

Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

The key to the art of prayer is thought. As we think so we pray. The highest level of prayer is to think God’s thoughts after Him, to attune our lives to love, hope, faith, justice, kindness; to become open channels for the goodness of God. Prayer is quiet meditation about eternal values. It is the mind adventuring in the universe. Prayer moves with the instantaneous speed of thought, through infinite space, to the four corners of the earth, to the depth of the human heart, to the mountaintop of inspiration.

Art | Earth | Eternal | Faith | God | Heart | Hope | Inspiration | Justice | Kindness | Love | Meditation | Mind | Prayer | Quiet | Space | Thought | Universe | Art | Think |

Thomas Moore

The point in a relationship is not to make us feel good, but to lead us into a profound alchemy of soul that reveals to us any of the pathways and opening that are the geography of our own destiny and potentiality.

Alchemy | Destiny | Good | Relationship | Soul |

Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

Happy | Joy | Life | Life | Quiet |

Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye.

Life | Life | Men | Quiet | Will |