Great Throughts Treasury

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

Compassion

"God is a Spirit infinitely happy, therefore we must approach to him with cheerfulness; he is a Spirit of infinite majesty, therefore we must come before him with reverence; he is a Spirit infinitely holy, therefore we must address him with purity; he is a Spirit infinitely glorious, we must therefore acknowledge his excellency in all that we do, and in our measures contribute to his glory, by having the highest aims in his worship; he is a Spirit infinitely provoked by us, therefore we must offer up our worship in the name of a pacifying Mediator and Intercessor." - Stephen Charnock

"There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marriage, gradually, at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after twenty-five years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with." - Stephen Mitchell

"The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions — none more so than the most capable." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to recover our own sovereignty." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"By eating meat we share the responsibility of climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian will make a difference in the health of our planet." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"First you have to look deeply into the nature of your anger, despair, and suffering to free yourself, so you can be available to others." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The fact is that when you make the other suffer, he will try to find relief by making you suffer more. The result is an escalation of suffering on both sides." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Through my love for you, I want to express my love for the whole cosmos, the whole of humanity, and all beings. By living with you, I want to learn to love everyone and all species. If I succeed in loving you, I will be able to love everyone and all species on Earth... This is the real message of love." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet." - Thomas Merton

"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." - Thomas Merton

"We have to recognize that a spirit of individualism and confusion has reduced us to an ethic of “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” This ethic, unfortunately sometimes consecrated by formulas, is nothing but the secular ethic of the affluent society, based on the false assumption that if everyone is bent on making money for himself the common good will automatically follow, due to the operation of economic laws." - Thomas Merton

"Praised are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Creator of light and darkness, who make peace and fashions all things. In mercy, You illuminate the world and those who live upon it. In Your goodness You daily renew creation. How numerous are You works, Adonai! In wisdom, You formed them all, filling the earth with Your creatures. Be praised, Adonai our God, for the excellent work of your hands, And for the lights You created; may they glorify You. Shine a new light upon Zion, that we may swiftly merit its radiance. Praised are You Adonai, Creator of heavenly lights." - Union Prayer Book NULL

"Adonai, source of blessings, boundless in understanding. You planned the shining of the sun and made it happen. Your creations are amazing and bring glory to Your name; sun, moon, and stars illuminate and encircle Your throne. Your heavenly servants exalt You, they constantly testify to Your glory and your holiness. And we too declare that You Adonai, be praised for your wonderful creations, for the lights that You turn on daily, for the sun and moon that reflect your glory." - Union Prayer Book NULL

"People cannot learn by having information pressed into their brains. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed in. First, one must create a state of mind that craves knowledge, interest and wonder. You can only teach by creating an urge to learn. " - Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf

"I admit I know little of Orient art. But that is because I cannot find in it what I am looking for, or what I am talking about. To me the Oriental idea of beauty is that ‘it isn’t there’. It is in a state of nor being there. It is absent. That is why it is so good. It is the same thing I don’t like in Suprematism, Purism and non-objectivity.. ..I do like the idea that they - the pots and pans (in the old still lives) , I mean – are always in relation to man. They have no soul of their own, like they seem to have in the Orient.." - Willem de Kooning

"Man on the dubious waves of error toss'd." - William Cowper

"Lenin was a Great Russian peasant et rien de plus, mais r-r-rien de plus. Oh yes, he was a dialectician, the only true one among them. But most of all he was a Russian and that is to be a peasant." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers

"While there is life there is hope, has deeper meaning in reverse. While there is hope there is life. Hope comes first, life follows. Hope gives power to life. Hope rouses life to continue to expand, to grow, to reach out, to go on. Hope sees a light where there isn't any. Hope lights candles in millions of despairing hearts. Where would I be without hope?" - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"My ties and ballasts leave me - I travel - I sail - My elbows rest in the sea-gaps. I skirt the sierras. My palms cover continents - I am afoot with my vision." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Cruelty is the highest pleasure to the cruel man; it is his love." - Walter Savage Landor

"Heaven on Earth is a choice you must make, not a place we must find." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"We don't have the wisdom required to hear what is truly necessary to hear right action, right understanding, right livelihood. We inadvertently break things even as we try to fix them. Our busy-ness becomes a kind of violence because it destroys the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful. On one level, suffering comes because we inadvertently bring harm to the world that we're trying to help whether we're raising money to pay the bills, serving the homeless, or feeding the hungry. Having been in non-profit worlds for twenty-five years, I can say that the faster we go, the more we unintentionally mishandle the ones we love. They become an object of our ambition rather than the subject of our heart's attention, which requires a certain amount of time and company as well as money." - Wayne Muller

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing." - Wendell Berry

"The key statement about anyone's life is the redemption of the manifestation, through depth understanding that bypasses social conditioning, spiritual materialism, defenses and preferences." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"The belief, the try, a camera and some film - the fragile weapons of my good intentions. With these I fought war." - W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith

"But being a religious person, I would like to question the validity of everything for myself. That is the essence of religion, which is humility. Not to accept anything unless you understand the meaning there of, personally in your life. If you accept without understanding, you will be imposing upon the mind. And then you are neither true to the mind, nor true to the meaning. The essence of religion, which is humility, lies in uncovering the meaning of life, uncovering the meaning of every moment, learning the meaning for ourselves." - Vimala Thakar

"Compassion is a spontaneous movement of wholeness. It is not a studied decision to help the poor, to be kind to the unfortunate. Compassion has a tremendous momentum that naturally, choicelessly moves us to worthy action. It has the force of intelligence, creativity, and the strength of love. Compassion cannot be cultivated; it derives neither from intellectual conviction nor from emotional reaction. It is simply there when the wholeness of life becomes a fact that is truly lived." - Vimala Thakar

"Correct diet implies the right quality and quantity as well as the frequency of intake. Eating should be related to appetite. It should not cause any excitement, or emotional disturbance. It should be gone through peacefully and happily. One has to be very alert to see that everything one eats is fully digested. The body should not be burdened with undigested food. The cleanliness of all the internal organs is one of the most important factors of meditation." - Vimala Thakar

"Keeping the Body and Brain Sensitive, Alert and Sharp - It is necessary to keep the body sensitive, alert and sharp, to feed it and to clothe it correctly, properly; to give it a chance to go through exercises which will mobilize not only the muscles, but also the nerves and be careful that the body does not become sluggish; to feed it correctly - not over- nor under-feeding it; to allow it to have sleep, necessary for its health - not to over- nor under-sleep; not to expose it to too much brooding, worrying, anxiety, which are impotent ways of wasting energy; not entering into excesses of indulgence and not denying and suppressing in the name of austerity, religion or discipline; because the cerebral organ, the brain is woven into this biological structure. It is very important, because in a sluggish body, in a lazy body, you can't have a sharp, sensitive, alert brain, which would voluntarily go into non-action. Self-education is vitally necessary in order to enable the cerebral organ to function in an orderly, quiet way. When there is order, there is a quietness; an orderly person hardly gets excited. It is disorder that leads to excitement, enthusiasm, depression which is the other side of excitement, passivity which is the obverse of enthusiasm. When one has arrived at that orderliness in daily living, in whatever one does, then only one can talk about the brain voluntarily, relinquishing the outgoing and the ingoing movement, relinquishing voluntarily the hold upon the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, so that the infinite could be." - Vimala Thakar

"It is only recently that India fell under the impact of alien cultures which highlighted material comfort, physical luxury, sensual liberty, and exterior display; and that Indians have trodden the wrong path of exploitation and violence, idleness and pompousness." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Our Lord and Master is the source of pleasures and liberation; and yet, the fool forgets Him." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

"The accumulation of good work is joyful." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL

"The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down." - Thurgood Marshall

"We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. Writers in other countries approach the matter differently. Old stories in our own are different from new. There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth. To the ignorant they may seem to operate at cross purposes. The Greater Vehicle is full of them, but the general burden is always the same. The difference between enlightenment and confusion is of about the same order as the difference between the good and the bad in a romance. If one takes the generous view, then nothing is empty and useless." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki

"I encourage all you superior seekers in the secret depths to devote yourselves to penetrating and clarifying the self, as earnestly as you would put out a fire on the top of your head." - Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL

"Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled" - Edwin Way Teale

"The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time." - Elif Safak

"In liberating Iraq, we have rid the nation and the rest of the world from the danger of Saddam Hussein." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole

"It does pay to be honest. It pays in rewarding relationships. It pays in unblocked energy. It pays in passion. To stand tall in who you are, unafraid to reveal what you want and need, kind enough to tell the truth, and brave enough to bear the consequences, is a telling sign of spiritual development." - Elizabeth Lesser

"I die but when the grave shall press the heart so long endeared to thee when earthy cares no more distress and earthy joys are nought to me. Weep not, but think that I have past before thee o'er the sea of gloom. Have anchored safe and rest at last where tears and mouring cannot come. 'Tis I should weep to leave thee here on that dark ocean sailing drear with storms around and fears before and no kind light to point the shore. But long or short though life may be 'tis nothing to eternity. We part below to meet on high where blissful ages never die." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell

"It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"To press non-economic values into the framework of the economic calculus, economists use the method of cost/benefit analysis. This is generally thought to be an enlightened and progressive development, as it is at least an attempt to take account of costs and benefits which might otherwise be disregarded altogether. In fact, however, it is a procedure by which the higher is reduced to the level of the lower and the priceless is given a price. It can therefore never serve to clarify the situation and lead to an enlightened decision. All it can do is lead to self-deception or the deception of others; all one has to do to obtain the desired results is to impute suitable values to the immeasurable costs and benefits. The logical absurdity, however, is not the greatest fault of the undertaking: with is worse, and destructive of civilization, is the pretense that everything has a price or, in other words, that money is the highest of all values." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Who troubles others has no rest himself." - Italian Proverbs

"Wisdom acquired by experience is basically only very bitterly acquired." - Italian Proverbs

"Yes and no rule the world." - Italian Proverbs

"[A conductor's] happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music. The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time." - Itay Talgam

"Accidents, try to change them -it's impossible. The accidental reveals man." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly