Great Throughts Treasury

"Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the universal being; truth the perfect comprehension of the universal mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experience, through our illumined consciousness - how, otherwise, can we know truth?" -

"A democracy can obtain truth only as the result of experience; and many nations may perish while they are awaiting the consequences of their errors." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"In times when the passions are beginning to take charge of the conduct of human affairs, one should pay less attention to what men of experience and common sense are thinking than to what is preoccupying the imagination of dreamers." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to other feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them." -

"Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness." -

"Use all your intelligence and experience in managing your own life, employing the tenderness you would expect to find in a being of ideal kindness." - Abbé Henri De Tourville

"I am still determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go." - Martha Washington, fully Martha Dandridge Curtis Washington

"The only truths we can point to are the ever-changing truths of our own experience." - Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

"We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue." - Edith Wharton

"However learned or eloquent, man knows nothing truly that he has not learned from experience." - Heinrich Otto Wieland

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows." - David T. Wolfe

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice." -

"In an active life is sown the seed of wisdom; but he who reflects not, never reaps; has no harvest from it, but carries the burden of age without the wages of experience; nor knows himself old, but from his infirmities, the parish register, and the contempt of mankind. And age if it is not esteem, has nothing." -

"The man whom neither riches nor luxury nor grandeur can render happy may, with a book in his hand, forget all his troubles under the friendly shade of every tree, and may experience pleasures as infinite as they are varied, as pure as they are lasting, as lively as they are unfading, and as compatible with every public duty as they are contributory to private happiness." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

"We live in a biochemical, neurophysiological, resonant quantum soup. If this is true, the responsibility for what we have for our inner life is enormous, and extends far beyond one’s own personal and spiritual development. Whatever our inner experience might be in terms of love and passion, hate and greed, abundance and longing, or any other human qualities may well not be ours alone." - Jeanne Achterberg

"In its purest form music is not a representational but rather a nonobjective, nonverbal world, it is a world of its own, almost a creatio ex hihilo, an occasion for immediacy of experience, a nonreducible mode of beauty, of contrast and resolution, of order and ecstasy flowing through and beyond the order. Order, and ecstasy rooted in order: that sounds like the relation between law and love, law and gospel." - James Luther Adams

"New research suggests that the brain influences, and may, in fact, be wired to experience God or deep spirituality. Religious experience often stems from temporal-lobe and limbic system function,, and obsessions (religious and others) stem from too much activity in the anterior cingulated gyrus and basal ganglia." - Daniel Amen

"Everything proves the solidarity of individuals, and no one can think at all except by means of the general store of thought, accumulated and refined by centuries of cultivation and experience." - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Whatever it is that we value in life – relationships, creativity, learning, aesthetic experience, food, sex, travel – the call to seize the day is the call to appreciate these things while we can and not to put them off indefinitely. Some things require work and time, and often the best choice is not to do today everything you want to do before you die. The true spirit of carpe diem is not to panic and try to do everything now, but to make sure every day counts. The wisdom of carpe diem is that time is short, this is the only life we have and we should not squander it." - Julian Baggini

"When we contemplate the meaning of life, we are thinking on the plane of action, of practical decisions and choices we have to make. No matter what the metaphysicians say about free will, we have to experience the world as one with choices and dilemmas and we have to resolve them as beings able to think them through and make decisions" - Julian Baggini

"All revelation is given, not in the form of directly communicated knowledge, but through events occurring in the historical experience of mankind, events which are apprehended by faith as the “mighty acts” of God." -

"Whether or not `life has meaning’ is to an important extent determined by the quality of one’s experience… Meaningfulness, then, appears to be the more appropriate category, and rather than asking, “what is the meaning of life?” it seems more helpful to ask, “under what conditions can life be experienced as meaningful?… intrinsic value without loss of content." - James O. Bennett, fully James O'

"In Godmanhood human freedom unites with the divine freedom, the human image with the divine image. By inward experience and inward living of freedom the light of that Truth is attained." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev

"A theology - any theology - not based on spiritual experience is mere panting - religious breathlessness." - Leonardo and Clodovis Boff

"Forgiveness. The experience of reconciliation following upon some breach of trust, marked on the one side by the acknowledgement of wrongdoing and the desire to make amends and on the other side by the capacity to understand and the willingness to resume friendly relations." - Anton Theophilus Boisen

"At best God can only reveal himself to us in terms of our experience in our historic setting. And the revelation that comes to us is to cooperate with God to bring form and order into the world as it is." - John Elof Boodin

"It is through the strength of our physical body, the wisdom of our heart’s experience, and the purity of our intention that we determine the quality of our life." - Gregg Braden

"The Kingdom of Heaven cometh not by observation. It comes by the appreciation of the signs of the presence and power of God in our inner experience." - Edgar Sheffield Brightman

"Every new experience is a new opportunity of knowing God. Every new experience is like a jewel set into the texture of our life, on which God shines and makes interpretation and revelation of Himself." - Phillips Brooks

"Just as life is defined as biological change and death as its lack, so meaning in life is characterized by the application of stable patterns to changing circumstances and the replacing of old patterns of understanding with new and exploratory ones. Meaning is found in the losing of it, the searching after it, and in the finding of it again. The meaning in your life is in flux and is to be found in the flux (the flow) of meaning, which is therefore itself a source of meaning in your life. All this does require, however, the developing of a tolerance for ambiguity, of a willingness to accept the inevitability of change and the precariousness of your present vision, and of an openness to the unending richness of your experience of the world in its manifold variety and diversity." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

"The meaning of life is to be found in the living of it, and even for the individual a considerable range of possibilities and an unending flow of reflections upon your life constitutes part of that meaning. Play has no ultimate goal, no serious goal that will bring it to an end, but rather renews itself in constant repetition, with no repetition being an exact repeat of a prior instance. Living has a series of goals and is serious as well as playful, and yet the goals are always in transformation, or at least always in doubt. Circumstances are often similar, but it is not easy to specify exactness in your lived experience, even with someone with whom you have lived most of your life." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

"Values do not exist apart from our experience of them… what is not an experience cannot be of intrinsic value… intrinsic values, or immediate values, are subjective, or dependent on the state of mind of the beholder." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

"Human sexuality is too noble and beautiful a thing, too profound a form of experience, to turn into a mere technique of physical relief, or a foolish and irrelevant pastime." -

"It was for the sake of security that the people of ancient ties turned to the Baals and other idols. Today, our oppressors turn to money and military power and to the so-called security forces. But their security is insecurity. We experience their security as intimidation and repression, terror, rape and murder. Those who turn to the idols for security demand our insecurity as the price that must be paid." - Center of Concern NULL

"There do remain dispersed in the soil of human nature diverse seeds of goodness, of benignity, of ingenuity, which being cherished, excited, and quickened by good culture, do by common experience thrust out flowers very lovely, and yield fruits very pleasant of virtue and goodness." - Lydia Maria Child

"Each mystic brings back confirmation of his own creed… The mystic brings his theological beliefs to the mystical experience; he does not derive them from it." - George Alonzo Coe

"The starting point of religious experience is wonder." - Seymour Cohen, fully Seymour Jay Cohen

"If people could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The opportunity offered by a shrinking economy to experience simple pleasures might be one of God’s better gifts to this generation." - Dolores Curran

"Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause." -

"Physically man can never arrive at more than a partial view, or better still, his partial view of the phenomena; to this extent all scientific conclusions would appear to be subjective. Morally considered, the matter goes further… the truth at which the experimenter arrives will depend on the character of his experience and on the power of his perception which he brings to bear upon the phenomenon. What we `see’ of the world depends on what we are capable of seeing." - L. Francis Edmunds

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion." - L. Francis Edmunds

"The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists." - L. Francis Edmunds

"What is important and of greatest significance is that an ideal of final truth is always before use and that the search for truth is acknowledged by all men as a duty not imposed from outside but born from within. The search for final truth rests with each individual personality and rendering the partial interpretations of our experience fundamentally consistent with one another. It is this fact that justifies the use of the word `God’ to designate the all embracing personality in whose existence ultimate reality exists." - L. Francis Edmunds

"A conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God." - Albert Einstein

"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self [ego]. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." - Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." - Albert Einstein

"In the axial mode, human life is understood as involving a journey in which those who are successful move from a Lower to a Higher Realm. This journey is central to the meaning of life. Through an elevated mode of knowing, the world as we ordinarily experience is largely left behind, deemed less if not illusory, and the domain of reality itself is approached." - Stephen A. Erickson

"God outside of us is a hypothesis; God inside of us is an experience." -