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

Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

Authority | Church | Will | Zeal |

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Does music make plants grow, or are there among the plans some that are musical?

Music |

T. B. Maston, fully Thomas Buford Maston

Segregation in the church violates something that is basic in the nature of the church. How can a church exclude from “the church of God” those who are children of God? How can it, as “the body of Christ,” withhold the privilege of worship from those who have been brought into union with Christ.

Body | Children | Church | God | Nature | Worship | Privilege |

John Locke

Every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical.

Church |

Thomas Merton

The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Despair | Joy | Life | Life | Music | Phenomena | Reality | Sadness | Silence |

Cecil Northcott

Toleration… is not true liberty when it is only a gracious concession by the state to the individual. Gracious concessions are incompatible with liberty of religion which is not something that a state, or an absolutist church offers, but that which the citizen claims and the law protects.

Church | Individual | Law | Liberty | Religion | Toleration |

Walter Rauschenbusch

The Church must either condemn the world and seek to change it, or tolerate it and conform to it. In the latter case it surrenders its holiness and its mission.

Change | Church | Mission | World |

Milton J. Rosenberg

People are coming to church not simply to partake of the sacred but to partake of sacred community.

Church | People | Sacred |

Francis Quarles

The voice of humility is God’s music and the silence of humility is God’s rhetoric.

God | Humility | Music | Rhetoric | Silence |

Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

In times of prosperity the church administers; in times of adversity the church shepherds.

Adversity | Church | Prosperity |

Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, aka Vatican II

The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions… In Hinduism, men probe the mystery of God and express it with a rich fund of myths, and a penetrating philosophy… In the various forms of Buddhism the basic inadequacy of this changing world is recognized and men are taught with confident application how they can achieve a state of complete liberation… The Church also regards with esteem the Muslims who worship the one, subsistent, merciful and almighty God… They venerate Jesus as a prophet… Given the great spiritual heritage common to Christians and Jews, it is the wish of this sacred Council to foster and recommend a mutual knowledge and esteem.

Church | Esteem | God | Knowledge | Men | Mystery | Nothing | Philosophy | Sacred | World | Worship | God |

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Is not music the food of love?

Love | Music |

Thomas De Witt Talmage

Among the first things created was the bird. Why? Because God wanted the world to have music at the start.

God | Music | World | God |

Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller

All about me may be silence and darkness, yet within me, in the spirit, is music and brightness, and color flashes through all my thoughts.

Darkness | Music | Silence | Spirit |

Gerald Alexander Larue

As we have seen over and over again, whenever church and state enter into partnership, human freedom is restricted, intellectual growth is stifled, and education is formalized and routinized to exclude and smother innovation and creativity.

Church | Creativity | Education | Freedom | Growth | Innovation |

Aaron Copland

If you want to understand music better, you can do nothing more important than to listen to it.

Better | Important | Music | Nothing | Understand |

Aaron Copland

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Music | Time |