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

P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

Religious revelation, philosophical thought, scientific investigation all converge on the problem of time and all come to the same view of it - time does not exist. there is no perpetual and eternal appearance and disappearance of phenomena. Everything exists always. There is only one eternal present. The world is world of infinite possibilities. Our mind follows the development of possibilities always in one direction only. But in fact every moment contains a very large number of possibilities, and all of them are actualised.

Appearance | Eternal | Mind | Phenomena | Present | Revelation | Thought | Time | World |

P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

Time does not exist! There exist no perpetual and eternal appearance and disappearance of phenomena, no ceaselessly flowing fountain of ever-appearing and ever-vanishing events. Everything exists always! There is only one eternal present, the Eternal Now, which the weak and limited human mind can never grasp and conceive. But the idea of the Eternal Now is not at all the idea of a cold and merciless predetermnation of everything, of an exact and infallible pre-existence.

Appearance | Eternal | Events | Existence | Mind | Phenomena | Present | Time |

Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes m ore conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune.

Appearance | Fortune | Good | Greatness | Spirit | Will | World |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie - for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance - will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance.

Alms | Appearance | Character | Example | Good | Impression | Murder | Nature | Truth | Will | Murder |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

Absence | Appearance | Life | Life | Practice | Reconciliation |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The less government we have the better - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.

Abuse | Appearance | Better | Character | Government | Growth | Imitation | Individual | Influence | Man | Power | Wise | Government |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary.

Appearance | Character | Man | Wise |

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the character which draws them.

Appearance | Character | Life | Life | Progress | Friends |

Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an

Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and in passivity, assertion and denial. To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment, there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

Appearance | Assertion | Enlightenment | Ignorance | Meaning | Nothing | Reality | Search | Talking | Thinking | Truth | Will | World | Think |

Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog

I find no difficulty in imagining that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence, and that it made its appearance in consequence of the volition of some pre-existing Being.

Appearance | Difficulty | Existence | Universe |

William Hazlitt

Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities owe possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.

Affectation | Appearance | Distinction | Envy | Folly | Infamy | Passion | Pride | Qualities | Superiority | Think | Vice |

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

It is crucial to understand and to gain the conviction that the laws of cause and effect govern the universe and all beings. … There are only two way to erase the trace left by a harmful act: either by going through the experience of suffering that is its natural consequence, or by purifying it with the appropriate antidotes before the appearance of its dire effects.

Appearance | Cause | Experience | Suffering | Universe | Govern | Understand |

Federico Fellini

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

Appearance | Awareness | Hell | Perception | Reality | World | Awareness |

Franz Kafka

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.

Appearance | Life | Life |

George Gaylord Simpson

A telescope, a telephone, or a typewriter is a complex mechanism serving a particular function. Obviously, its manufacturer had a purpose in mind, and the machine was designed and built in order to serve that purpose. An eye, an ear, or a hand is also a complex mechanism serving a particular function. It, too, looks as if it had been made for a purpose. This appearance of purposefulness is pervading in nature, in the general structure of animals and plants, in the mechanisms of their various organs, and in the give and take of their relationships with each other. Accounting for this apparent purposefulness is a basic problem for any system of philosophy or of science.

Appearance | Looks | Order | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | System |

George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Appearance | Murder | Sound | Murder |

Hugh Black

If happiness is a state of the inward life, we have to look for its chief obstructions not in outward conditions but in deeper places. Happiness depends in the last issue, as we saw, on the essential view of life. It is not a matter of distractions, nor even of mere pleasurable sensations. There may be an appearance of great prosperity with incurable sadness hidden at the heart, as there is an outward peace which is only a well-masked despair. The way to happiness is indeed harder than the way to success; for its chief enemies entrench themselves within the soul.

Appearance | Peace | Prosperity | Sadness | Happiness |

Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

The epoch of intense cold which preceded the present creation has been only a temporary oscillation of the earth's temperature, more important than the century-long phases of cooling undergone by the Alpine valleys. It was associated with the disappearance of the animals of the diluvial epoch of the geologists, as still demonstrated by the Siberian mammoths; it preceded the uplifting of the Alps and the appearance of the present-day living organisms, as demonstrated by the moraines and the existence of fishes in our lakes. Consequently, there is complete separation between the present creation and the preceding ones, and if living species are sometimes almost identical to those buried inside the earth, we nevertheless cannot assume that the former are direct descendants of the latter or, in other words, that they represent identical species.

Appearance | Existence | Important | Present |

José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez

Habit creates the appearance of justice: progress has no greater enemy than habit.

Appearance | Enemy | Progress |