Great Throughts Treasury

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. n." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy

"Intimacy - the willing revelation of self and absorption in another is a rare thing... those who do tend to view it as a fait accompli rather than as a communal being in need of constant renewal... True intimacy is a human constant... Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together of attention and release of energy." - Robert Grudin

"The secret of happiness is simple: find out what you truly love to do and then direct all of your energy towards doing it." - Robin Sharma

"Motives are symptoms of weakness and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation." -

"Humility leads to the highest distinction, because it leads to self-improvement. Study your own characters; endeavor to learn and to supply your own deficiencies; never assume to yourselves qualities which you do not possess; combine all this with energy and activity, and you cannot predicate of yourselves, nor can others predicate of you, at what point you may arrive at last." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

"Awakening is not possible so long as the mind is constantly distracted from Truth by remaining habitually egocentric, by instinctively seeking personal gratification. Divine Grace, the healing and illuminating energy that rains down ceaselessly upon the human mind, heart, and soul, cannot be absorbed or assimilated by the high, rocky hill of personal interest and personal importance. This precious, life-giving water runs off the high ground of ego, without ever penetrating its hard, barren soil." -

"It is safe to say that the prosperity of our people depends directly on the energy and intelligence with which our natural resources are used. It is equally clear that these resources are the final basis of national power and perpetuity. Finally, it is ominously evident that these resources are in the course of rapid exhaustion." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The real difference between men is energy. A strong will, a settled purpose, an invincible determination, can accomplish almost anything; and in this lies the distinction between great men and little men." - Thomas Fuller

"Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder

"If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense of organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in and drop out." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"Worry distorts our thinking, disrupts our work, disquiets our soul, disturbs our body, disfigures our face, destroys our poise, depresses our friends, demoralizes our life, defeats our faith and debilitates our energy." - William A. Ward, fully William Arthur Ward

"Unlimited power is helpless, as arbitrary power is capricious. Our energy is in proportion t the resistance it meets. We can attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter; we can persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them." - William Hazlitt

"Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We can attempt nothing great, but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter." - William Hazlitt

"All going, to make way for more and more devalued human stock, with less and less of the wild spark, the priceless ingredient – energy into matter. A vast mudslide of soulless sludge." - William S. Burroughs, fully William Seward Burroughs II

"If the intellectual has any function in society, it is to preserve a cool and unbiased judgment in the face of all solicitations to passion... During the war, the ordinary virtues, such as thrift, industry, and public spirit, were used to swell the magnitude of the disaster by producing a greater energy in the work of mutual extermination. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose. Of course, as different people have different purposes in life, what is relevant to the purpose of one person might not be relevant to the purpose of another....The degree of simplification is a matter for each individual to settle for himself." - Duane Elgin

"There is a field of energy that permeates the universe. This is understood by science, and now what we're beginning to discover is that field of energy is alive. One of its qualities is sentience or consciousness, and we can interact with that field. We're not just closed off in our physical bodies. We have the capacity to interact with the larger field of consciousness; it permeates our lives and touches us day-in and day-out. If there is needless suffering happening in the world, it tinges and colors the ocean of consciousness that we swim in, and we imbibe this daily. So, if we can create a world without undue suffering--one where we're not killing off all of these species and harming one another--it will change the atmosphere of our lives." - Duane Elgin

"Akon said to Elizabeth: “Mind forces, spiritual strength, soul attainment and thoughts are all made up of different speeds in the wave-length of light, or microatoms. Electricity is microatoms of light while sound and colour occur when the microatoms have different speeds, and when micro-atoms are stopped, they create heat. Light is an intelligent energy which can be thought into existence and substance. The pattern of the microatoms of light changes with changing thoughts, when one achieves the formula for the harmonic vibration of light. The key to all life and the Universe lies in the harmonic interaction of light. A mathematical formula for all transportation lies in the vibratory frequencies of light harmonic, with anti-gravity waves and time waves, which are simply the frequency rate between each pulse of the spiral of light." - Elizabeth Klarer

"Life is inherent in cosmic forces, and as we live and think, so the Universe responds to us. This is prayer, with our life fields or auras carrying an electrical charge to attract negative ions to us and be more stimulated. In this way our life fields remain positively charged and attract the negative particles or ions. This is the secret of life. Retaining communication and unity with the Universe ... our Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy … which is energy in harmonic interaction with neighboring galaxies and galaxies beyond into inter-galactic space … ad infinitum … where wave patterns create harmonic chords that can be read like a score of music … and the illusion of matter strung together with electromagnetic and nuclear forces of light." - Elizabeth Klarer

"The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced — by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"The physical world is a reflection of energy vibrations from more subtle worlds that, in turn, are reflections of still more subtle energy fields. Creation, and all subsequent existence, is a progression downward and outward from the primordial source." - Ervin László

"We are beginning to see the entire universe as a holographically interlinked network of energy and information, organically whole and self referential at all scales of its existence. We, and all things in the universe, are non-locally connected with each other and with all other things in ways that are unfettered by the hitherto known limitations of space and time." - Ervin László

"The power of our intention and the energy it unleashes are dependent on our levels of coherence and intensity. The affirmation of our positive intentions in thought, feeling and action increases the power of our abilities. Nonetheless, it is important to appreciate that the matrix of physical, emotional, and mental levels of consciousness through which our personal and collective intentions and choices are explored and experienced require a “health warning” on interpreting the Law of Attraction too simplistically." - Ervin László

"The universe we observe and inhabit is a secondary product of the energy sea that was there before there was anything there at all. Hindu and Chinese cosmologies have always maintained that the things and beings that exist in the world are a concretization or distillation of the basic energy of the cosmos, descending from its original source. The physical world is a reflection of energy vibrations from more subtle energy fields. Creation and all subsequent existence, is a progression downward and outward from the primordial source... In Indian philosophy the ultimate end of the physical world is a return to Akasha, its original subtle-energy womb. At the end of time as we know it, the almost infinitely varied things and forms of the manifest world dissolve into formlessness... In Akasha, all attributes of the manifest world merge into a state that is beyond attributes: the state of Brahman." - Ervin László

"Although it is undifferentiated, Brahman is dynamic and creative. From its ultimate 'being' comes the temporary 'becoming' of the manifest world, with its attributes, functions and relationships. The cycles of samsara [individual lifetimes] ... are the lila of Brahman: its play of ceaseless creation and dissolution. In Indian philosophy, absolute reality is the reality of Brahman. The manifest world enjoys but a derived, secondary reality and mistaking it for the real is the illusion of maya... The traditional Eastern conception differs from the view held by most people in the West... [that] reality is material. The things that truly exist are bits or particles of matter... Matter moves about in space, acted on by energy. Energy also enjoys reality (since it acts on matter), but space does not: space is merely the backdrop or the container... and is passive in itself... space is not experienced... it is only the precondition of experience... [this last comment exposes the Western reliance on sensory experience and therefore its entrapment within the illusion of the empirical world or Maya] The view that space is empty and passive, and not even real to boot, is in complete opposition to the view we get from contemporary physics... it is clear that what they describe as the unified vacuum – the seat of all the fields and forces of the physical world – is in fact the primary reality of the universe... What we think of as matter is but the quantised semi-stable bundling of the energies that spring from the vacuum. In the last count matter is but a waveform disturbance in the nearly infinite energy-sea that is the fundamental medium – and hence the primary reality – of this universe, and of all universes that ever existed and will ever exist." - Ervin László

"Information is entirely basic in the universe. In the latest conception the universe doesn't consist of matter and space; it consists of energy and information. Energy exists in the form of wave-patterns and wave-propagations in the quantum vacuum that fills space; in its various forms, energy is the "hardware" of the universe. The "software" is information. The universe is not an assemblage of bits of inert matter moving passively in empty space: it's a dynamic and coherent whole. The energy that constitutes its hardware is always and everywhere "in-formed." It's in-formed by what David Bohm called the implicate order and physicists now regard as the quantum vacuum or zero-point field (also called physical spacetime, universal field, or nuether). This is the "in-formation" that structures the physical world, the information we grasp as the laws of nature. Without information the energy-waves and patterns of the universe would be as random and unstructured as the behavior of a computer without its software. But the universe is not random and unstructured; it's precisely "in-formed." Would it be any the less precisely informed, complex systems could not have emerged in it, and we would not be here to ask how this on first sight highly improbable development could have come about." - Ervin László

"Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does 'life', but not so mind. " - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"Shortage of time is not your problem. Shortage of money is not your problem. Shortage of Connection to the Energy that creates worlds is at the heart of all sensations of shortage that you are experiencing." - Ester and Jerry Hicks

"For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story . . . communicates the most sacred of mysteries... story not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future." -

"Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. Th is story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence." -

"For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story communicates the most sacred of mysteries. Our story not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future." -

"Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence." -

"We all need to look into the dark side of our nature - that's where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we're busy denying." - Federico Fellini

"An authentically powered person lives in love. Love is the energy of the soul. Love is what heals the personality. There is nothing that cannot be healed by love. There is nothing but love." - Gary Zukav

"A power struggle collapses when you withdraw your energy from it. Power struggles become uninteresting to you when you change your intention from winning to learning about yourself." - Gary Zukav

"Every intention sets energy into motion Whether you are conscious of it or not." - Gary Zukav

"Forgiveness is not a moral issue. It is an energy dynamic... Forgiveness means that you do not carry the baggage of an experience. When you choose not to forgive, the experience that you do not forgive sticks with you. When you choose not to forgive, it is like agreeing to wear dark, gruesome sunglasses that distort everything, and it is you who are forced every day to look at life through those contaminated lenses because you have chosen to keep them. " - Gary Zukav

"Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self consciousness these are merged in one; for Spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realise itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially. According to this abstract definition it may be said of Universal History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. And as the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree, and the taste and form of its fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of that History." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions. " - George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair

"A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything" - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron

"For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will" - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts." - Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams

"There must be for me a deep sense of relatedness to God. This relatedness is the way by which there shall open for me more and more springs of energy and power, which will enable me to thread life’s mysteries with life’s clue. I shall not waste any effort trying to reduce God to my particular logic. Here in the quietness, I shall give myself in love to God. " - Howard Therman

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." - Howard Zinn

"I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits — attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available. ... Therefore, we must expect that if another war — a serious war — breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form." - Hyman George Rickover

"To do a job effectively, one must set priorities. Too many people let their "in" basket set the priorities. On any given day, unimportant but interesting trivia pass through an office; one must not permit these to monopolize his time. The human tendency is to while away time with unimportant matters that do not require mental effort or energy. Since they can be easily resolved, they give a false sense of accomplishment. The manager must exert self-discipline to ensure that his energy is focused where it is truly needed." - Hyman George Rickover

"You know what fear is? Each one has his own particular form of fear - not one, but multiple fears. A mind that has any form of fear cannot obviously have the quality of love, sympathy, tenderness. Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs. If you see that fear is destructive, then how do you proceed to wipe the mind clean? " - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"To live with beauty, or to live with an ugly thing, and not become habituated to it requires enormous energy - an awareness that does not allow your mind to grow dull. In the same way, sorrow dulls the mind if you merely get used to it - and most of us do get used to it. But you need not get used to sorrow. You can live with sorrow, understand it, go into it - but not in order to know about it. You know that sorrow is there; it is a fact, and there is nothing more to know. You have to live with sorrow, and to live with it you must love it; and then you will find, as I said earlier, that love and sorrow and death are one." - Jiddu Krishnamurti