Great Throughts Treasury

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

Difficulty

"Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it. " - William P. Montague, fully William Pepperell Montague

"An intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence.[Co-written with Charles B. TGhaxton and Robert L. Olsen]" - Walter L. Bradley

"The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them is a match." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers

"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries—the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning—without ever being bound to look at anything." - Walter Bagehot

"Reality alone exists - and that we are. All the rest is only a dream, a dream of the One Mind, which is our mind without the 'our'. Is it so hard to accept? Is it so difficult to assimilate and to live?" - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"The identified man takes part: the unidentified looks on!" - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish." - Wendell Berry

"When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Remember, the world is filled with people who do not know who they are, who spend their lives telling other people who they are." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God. True philosophy turns aside from religions, and pushes forward to religion." - Victor Hugo

"The universe contains what is necessary and only what is necessary. (II.3.iii)" - Victor Hugo

"Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for." - Václav Havel

"The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few." - Vannevar Bush

"Few people have enough background to suffer for the truth and say." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus

"The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers' document: it is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age" - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do." - William James

"Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in ones lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same ole addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma ( and also of western psychology, by the way)- take care of the problem now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"God is fully present here with me, now. God is the only real Presence, all the rest is but a shadow. God is perfect Good, and God is the cause only of perfect Good. The same fountain cannot send forth both sweet and bitter water. God never sends sickness, trouble, accident, temptation, nor death itself; nor does He authorize these things. I am divine spirit. I am a child of God. In God I live and move and have my being; so I do not fear. I am surrounded by the Presence of God and all is well. I am not afraid of the past; I am not afraid of the present; I am not afraid of the future; for God is with me. The Eternal God is my dwelling place and underneath are the everlasting arms. Nothing can touch me but the direct action of God Himself, and God is Love." - Emmet Fox

"Prayer is the only real action in the full sense of the word, because prayer is the only thing that changes one's character. A change in character, or a change in soul, is a real change. When that kind of change takes place, you become a different person and, therefore, for the rest of your life you act in a different way from the way in which you have previously acted, and in which you would have continued to act had you not prayed. In other words, you become a different person. The amount of difference may be only very slight for each time that you pray: nevertheless it is there, for you cannot pray without making yourself different in some degree." - Emmet Fox

"Refuse to tolerate anything less than harmony. You can have prosperity no matter what your present circumstances may be. You can have health and physical fitness. You can have a happy and joyous life. You can have a good home of your own. You can have congenial friends and comrades. You can have a full, free, joyous life, independent and untrammeled. You can become your own master or your own mistress. But to do this you must definitely seize the rudder of your own destiny and steer boldly and firmly for the port that you intend to make." - Emmet Fox

"Stop thinking about your difficulties, whatever they are, and start thinking about God instead." - Emmet Fox

"There is no need to be unhappy. There is no need to be sad. There is no need to be disappointed, or oppressed, or aggrieved. There is no need for illness or failure or discouragement. There is no necessity for anything but success, good health, prosperity, and an abounding interest and joy in life." - Emmet Fox

"The age demanded that we dance, and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation." - Eudora Welty

"Your question is already answered by the fact that I made you take a test. You have now reached a stage where teacher and pupil are no longer two persons, but one. You can separate from me any time you wish. Even if broad seas lie between us, I shall always be with you when you practice what you have learned. I need not ask you to keep up your regular practicing, not to discontinue it on any pretext whatsoever, and to let no day go by without your performing the ceremony, even without bow and arrow, or at least without having breathed properly. I need not ask you because I know that you can never give up this spiritual archery. Do not ever write to me about it, but send me photographs from time to time so that I can see how you draw the bow. Then I shall know everything I need to know." - Eugen Herrigel

"Go, words, betrayed the bite secreted in vain, the wind blowing in the heart. The real reason is most of those who keep silent" - Eugenio Montale

"During a political campaign everyone is concerned with what a candidate will do on this or that question if he is elected except the candidate; he's too busy wondering what he'll do if he isn't elected." - Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen

"There is a great and crying evil in modern society. It is want of purpose. It is that narrowness of vision which shuts out the wider vistas of the soul. It is the absence of those sublime emotions which, wherever they arise, do not fall to exalt and consecrate existence." - Felix Adler