Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Evidence

"The regeneration of a sinner is an evidence of power in the highest sphere - moral nature; with the highest prerogative - to change nature; and operating to the highest result - not to create originally, which is great; but to create anew, which is greater." - William Arthur

"Faith without evidence is, properly, not faith, but prejudice or presumption; faith beyond evidence is superstition, and faith contrary to evidence is either insanity or willful perversity of mind." - Arthur Aughey

"Right actions for the future are the best explanations or apologies for wrong ones in the past; the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receive." - Tyron Edwards

"Sincerity is no test of truth - no evidence of correctness of conduct. You may take poison sincerely believing it the needed medicine, but will it save your life?" - Tyron Edwards

"Neutrality, as a lasting principle, is an evidence of weakness." - Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva

"It is not true that a man can believe or disbelieve what he will. But it is certain that an active desire to find any proposition true will unconsciously tend to that result, by dismissing importunate suggestions which run counter to the belief, and welcoming those which favor it. The psychological law, that we only see what interests us, and only assimilate what is adapted to our condition, causes the mind to select its evidence." - George Henry Lewes

"The only conclusive evidence of a man’s sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth whatever it may be, has taken possession of him." - James Russell Lowell

"Confidence in another man's virtue, is no slight evidence of one's own." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses." -

"Hesitation is the best cure for anger. Seek this concession from anger right away, not to gain its pardon, but that it may evidence some discrimination. The first blows of anger are heavy, but if it waits, it will think again. Do not try to destroy it immediately. Attacked piecemeal, it will be entirely overcome." -

"Every human being has four hungers; the hunger of the loins, the hunger of the belly, the hunger of the mind, the hunger of the soul. You can get by a long time on the loins and the belly, but there is a good deal of evidence that even the meanest men eventually crave something for the mind and soul." - James Webb

"For all his learning or sophistication, man is still instinctively reaching toward that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is." - Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland

"The observation is that, generally speaking, poverty of speech is the outward evidence of poverty of mind" - Bruce Burton

"There are five tests of the evidence of education - correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection, efficiency or the power to do." - Nicholas Murray Butler

"The violence that surrounds us in our streets and in our homes and in our world is evidence that we have succumbed to the temptation of the desert. We face and deep and profound spiritual crisis." - Joan Brown Campbell

"Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"Our opinions on all subjects are more largely formed by our sympathies than by carefully sifted evidence." - Tyron Edwards

"Ridicule may be the evidence of wit or bitterness and may gratify a little mind, or an ungenerous temper, but it is no test of reason and truth." - Tyron Edwards

"Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past - the best evidence of regret for them that we can offer, or the world receives." - Tyron Edwards

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence to the fact." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"God does not require you to follow His leading on blind trust. Behold the evidence of an invisible intelligence pervading everything, even you own mind and body." - Raymond Holliwell

"I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences." - William James

"The universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has the tendency to think in a way which, for want of a better word, we describe as mathematical. It begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." -

"From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician." -

"All history, so far as it is unsupported by contemporary evidence, is romance." -

"Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life." - Charles Lamb

"We leap to correct answers before there are sufficient data, we intuit, we grasp, we jump to conclusions despite the lack of convincing evidence." - Donald Norman

"It is no certain evidence, that because the conscience feels the weight of sin, the heart is humbled on account of it; that because the conscience approves of the rectitude of the Divine justice, the heart bows to the Divine sovereignty." - Gardiner Spring

"Whenever our life is stirred by truth, it expresses energy and comes to be filled, as it were, with a creative ardor. This consciousness of the creative urge is evidence of the force of truth on our mind." -

"Every creation is subject to recurrence. Every thing you meet had a previous existence: whatever you have lost will come again. Every thing comes a second time: all things return to a settled position when they have gone away, all things begin when they have ceased to be. They are brought to an end in order that they may come into being: nothing is lost except that it may be recovered. All this revolving order of things, therefore, is evidence of the resurrection of the dead. God ordained it in works before He commanded it in writing, He proclaimed it by strength before he proclaimed it in words. He first sent you nature as teacher, intending to send you prophecy also, in order that having learnt from nature, you may the more easily believe prophecy." - Tertullian, fully Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian NULL

"Originality is the supreme evidence of genius." -

"There runs throughout Nature unmistakable evidence of thought, corresponding to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence; and no theory that overlooks this element can be true to nature." - Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

"The constants in all religion are the mystery of the universe, the nostalgia of the human spirit for an order beyond the show and flux of things to which it believes itself akin, and the belief that it has evidence of such an order." - Gaius Glenn Atkins

"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." - Gregg Braden

"The essence of all beauty, I call love. The attribute, the evidence, and end, the consummation to the inward sense of beauty apprehended from without, I still call love." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Modern mental hospitals, where every method of control has been euphemistically renamed, can be frightening places. The actions of every staff member – the aide who holds a patient down, the nurse who injects the medication, the doctor who prescribes it – all have been defined as benevolent. Patients who dare to utter the unauthorized reality – that they are prisoners and that their “helpers” are jailers – only provide further evidence that they are indeed ill. Succumbing to brainwashing, accepting reality as defined by one’s captors, differs from a psychiatric “cure” only because in the latter case the accepted reality is the prevailing one. Holding a minority position makes a person a potential subject for psychiatric brainwashing." - Judi Chamberlin, née Ross

"Your subconscious mind produces in your daily life evidence of the thoughts you send back to it. The constant repetition of fear, anxiety and worry thoughts will bring upon you the same thing multiplied many times over, but the constant practice of positive thinking, making affirmations hour by hour that God is now healing your fears and worries, will bring magnificent results... You have the ability for successful living. You have the tools. The power you use is faith and the tools are your thoughts and ideas." - Albert E Cliffe

"Materialism assumes a line of `continuity’ running through the whole scheme of nature, despite its obvious gaps; on the contrary, he underlines the significance of `discontinuity’ as positive evidence of the intervention of a higher source of influence which escapes man’s limited `scale of observation.’ A giant or a microbe would, with similar intelligence, observe the same phenomenon differently; they might be guided by their scales of observation to different, or at least, to modified conclusions. There is no scientific truth in an absolute sense. The phrase Ad veritatem per scientiam is an absurdity." - L. Francis Edmunds

"When will the churches learn that intolerance, personal or ecclesiastical, is an evidence of weakness: The confident can afford to be calm and kindly; only the fearful must defame and exclude." -

"Every day we shall see about us evidence of human pettiness, greed, self-centeredness. But if we observe carefully we also see human nobility, generosity, self-surrender and genuine religious conviction and action. The cynic remembers only man’s faults – that is why he remains a cynic. The wise man remembers his brother’s virtues. Which shall we choose to remember?" - Sidney Greenberg

"Could the mind have an existence entirely independent of the central nervous system?... Scientific evidence that not only was her brain not working, it specifically demonstrated the absence of all cortical activity when these conversations actually took place. So where could these brand-new memories have been created?... Imagine the implications of the notion that quanta of conscious energy could exist independently in the Universe, able to enter from anywhere, at any time." - Allan J Hamilton

"Refusal to cooperate with the [hospital] psychiatrist, rather than being within his rights under the Fifth Amendment, may be construed as evidence of a “paranoid illness” for which [the patient] requires further psychiatric hospitalization." - Ron Leifer, fully Ronald Leifer

"What did Resurrection mean but victory over death and therefore victory over sin and therefore evidence of a new power at work in the world and therefore the opening of the gates of a new life?" - Edwin Lewis

"The plainest historical evidence for the effectiveness of religion as a positive social form lies in the history of the Jews." - John Macmurray

"Today’s dogma holds that matter is eternal. The dogma comes from the intuitive belief of people who don’t want to accept the observational evidence that the universe was created – despite the fact that the creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far. As a result, the people who reject the data can arguably be described as having a religious belief that matter must be eternal… Since scientists prefer to operate in the belief that the universe must be meaningless – that reality consists of nothing more than the sum of the world’s tangible constituents – they cannot confront the idea of creation easily, or take it lightly." - Arno Allan Penzias

"The knowledge that mankind needs is not the way or principle which has an absolute existence, but the particular truths for here and now and for particular individuals. Absolute truth is imaginary, abstract, vague, without evidence, and cannot be demonstrated." - Hu Shih, born Hu Hung-hsing

"Knowledge of reality has never the certainty of complete evidence… Every knowledge of reality by the human mind has the character of higher or lower probability." -

"Scientific evidence is accretionary, built from blocks of evidence joined artfully by the blueprints and mortar of theory. Only very rarely, as in the theories of natural selection and relativity, does an idea change our conception of the world in one quantal leap." -

"Faith is not evidence." - Dan Barker