Great Throughts Treasury

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

Journey

"No longer a stranger, you listen all day to these crazy love-words. Like a bee you fill hundreds of homes with honey, though yours is a long flight from here." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"There is no room for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing when sweet water is everywhere?" - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"You may make a jewelry flower out of gold and rubies and emeralds, but it will not have fragrance." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas; they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them." - Russell H. Conwell, fully Russell Herman Conwell

"If you have had enough of your friend, grant him a loan." - Russian Proverbs

"Any kind of thought or meditation or pleasure would impede and disturb the soul and would introduce noise into the deep silence which the soul should observe in order to hear the deep and delicate voice in which God speaks to the heart in this secret place. When the soul is led into silence, it must forget even the practice of loving advertence… it must practice that advertence only when it is not conscious of being brought into solitude or interior rest or forgetfulness. Pure contemplation consists in receiving. The soul approaches God more nearly by not understanding than by understanding. Faith is darkness to the understanding. God brought them to this solitude and emptiness of their faculties and operations that He may speak to their hearts. God is leading you through the state of solitude and recollection and withdrawing you from your labors of sense. Return not to sense again. Lay aside your operations for they will now be a great obstacle and hindrance to you, since God is granting you the grace of Himself working within you. God is bearing the soul in His arms… and thus, although it is making progress at the rate willed by God Himself, it is not conscious of such movement. Three kinds of love: 1. the soul now loves God, not through itself but through Himself. 2. the soul is absorbed in the love of God and God surrenders Himself to the soul with great vehemence. 3. the soul love Him for Who He is." - Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL

"God is awakened in the soul. God breathes in the soul. Wisdom is more active than all active things. Oh, how happy is this soul that is ever conscious of God resting and reposing within its breast!" - Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL

"This divine knowledge of God never deals with particular things. This sublime knowledge can be received only by a person who has arrived at union with God, for it is itself that very union. It consists in a certain touch of the divinity produced in the soul, and thus it is God Himself who is experienced and tasted there… This knowledge savors of the divine essence and of eternal life. They are so sensible that they sometimes cause not only the soul but also the body to tremble. Yet at other times with a sudden feeling of spiritual delight and refreshment, and without any trembling, they occur very tranquilly in the spirit. Since this knowledge is imparted to the soul suddenly, without exercise of free will, a person does not have to be concerned about desiring it or not. He should simply remain humble and resigned about it, for God will do His work at the time and in the manner he wishes. God does not bestow these favors on a possessive soul, since He gives them out of a very special love for the recipient. For the individual receiving them is one who loves God with great detachment." - Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL

"When the will, in becoming aware of the satisfaction afforded by the object of sight, hearing, or touch, immediately elevates itself to God, it is doing something very good." - Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL

"When temptation overtakes the deceitful man, he does not have the presence of mind to call upon God, or to expect salvation from Him, since in the days of his ease he stood aloof from God's will." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL

"Every dawn renews the Beginning, and to behold the earth struggling out of the formless void, out of the night, is to witness the act of creation." - Sholem Asch, born Szalom Asz, also written Shalom Asch

"One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action." - Simone Weil

"The day that you can love the woman in their entirety, in its weakness, not to escape herself but to find, not to resign but to say that day love will become for her. As for man, source of life and not mortal danger." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle

"The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified." - Stephen Hawking

"The barrier between the western mode of consciousness and the natural world, and the consequent ethical deficiency in western conscience, began in some manner with the biblical emphasis on the perception of the divine in historical events rather than within cosmological manifestation. The entire biblical experience could be described as a movement from the cosmological to the historical which began with the Exodus experience. It was further strengthened by the historical redemption experience of Christianity; then by the emphasis on the human mode of being in the Greek humanist tradition. When in modem centuries the scientists gave us a natural world that came into being by purely random processes and without any spiritual meaning then the alienation of the human from the natural world was complete." - Thomas Berry

"Only a man harrowing clods in a slow silent walk with an old horse that stumbles and nods, half asleep as they stalk." - Thomas Hardy

"The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible" - Thomas Hardy

"The most sacred of the duties of a government is to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens." - Thomas Jefferson

"How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life?" - Thomas Merton

"Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love." - Thomas Merton

"One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife." - Thomas Merton

"Our task now is to learn that if we can voyage to the ends of the earth and find ourselves in the aborigine who most differs from ourselves, we will have made a fruitful pilgrimage. That is why pilgrimage is necessary, in some shape or other. Mere sitting at home and meditating on the divine presence is not enough for our time. We have to come to the end of a long journey and see that the stranger we meet there is no other than ourselves – which is the same as saying we find Christ in him." - Thomas Merton

"Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved." - Thomas Merton

"The goal of fasting is inner unity. This means hearing but not with the ear hearing, but not with the understanding it is hearing with the spirit, with your whole being.... The hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence, it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitations and from preoccupations." - Thomas Merton

"A Farmhouse on the Wei River - In the slant of the sun on the country-side, Cattle and sheep trail home along the lane; And a rugged old man in a thatch door Leans on a staff and thinks of his son, the herdboy. There are whirring pheasants, full wheat-ears, Silk-worms asleep, pared mulberry-leaves. And the farmers, returning with hoes on their shoulders, Hail one another familiarly. ...No wonder I long for the simple life And am sighing the old song, Oh, to go Back Again." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"Reeds of Innocence - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped: he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’ So I sung the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight; And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear. " - William Blake

"A Fable - A raven, while with glossy breast Her new-laid eggs she fondly press'd, And, on her wicker-work high mounted, Her chickens prematurely counted (A fault philosophers might blame, If quite exempted from the same), Enjoy'd at ease the genial day; 'Twas April, as the bumpkins say, The legislature call'd it May. But suddenly a wind, as high As ever swept a winter sky, Shook the young leaves about her ears, And fill'd her with a thousand fears, Lest the rude blast should snap the bough, And spread her golden hopes below. But just at eve the blowing weather And all her fears were hush'd together: And now, quoth poor unthinking Ralph. 'Tis over, and the brood is safe; (For ravens, though, as birds of omen, They teach both conjurors and old women To tell us what is to befall, Can’t prophesy themselves at all.) The morning came, when neighbour Hodge, Who long had mark'd her airy lodge, And destined all the treasure there A gift to his expecting fair, Climb’d like a squirrel to his dray, And bore the worthless prize away. Moral: 'Tis Providence alone secures In every change both mine and yours: Safety consists not in escape From dangers of a frightful shape; An earthquake may be bid to spare The man that’s strangled by a hair. Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oft’nest in what least we dread, Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow. " - William Cowper

"I believe no man was ever scolded out of his sins." - William Cowper

"My sin and judgment are alike peculiar. I am a castaway, deserted and condemned." - William Cowper

"Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, the clouds you so much dread are big with mercy and shall break, with blessings on your head" - William Cowper

"I sit along in the dark bamboo grove, playing the zither and whistling long. In this deep wood no one would know - only the bright moon comes to shine." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"Seated alone by shadowy bamboos, I strum my lyre and laugh aloud; none know that I am here, deep in the woods; only the bright moon comes to shine on me." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here." - Wendell Berry

"The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"Experience the mystery of pain, open to it, allow it. When you do, the experience shifts. What basically generates pain is the defense against it." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"I am ignorant of how I was formed and how I was born. Through a quarter of my lifetime I was absolutely ignorant of the reasons for everything I saw and heard and felt, and was merely a parrot prompted by other parrots... When I sought to advance along that infinite course, I could neither find one single footpath or fully discover one single object, and from the upward leap I made to contemplate eternity I fell back into the abyss of my ignorance." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"The observation of the breathing rhythm is suggested as a support to those who cannot arrive at the spontaneous stillness of total mind without some support. But to depend upon the support for a long period is undesirable and unwarranted. One has to discover for oneself whether one is learning self-reliance through the support or not. Simple observation of the breathing rhythm culminates into silence or total awareness within a few weeks. Secondly the hour of silence should enable one to live in awareness throughout the day." - Vimala Thakar

"Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Fighting inner darkness in the wrong way is the same as submitting to it. Truth will show you how to truly fight for light." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress." - Victor Hugo

"As the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people have the means to live, but no meaning to live for." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"Praise the virtues of fearlessness. A truly fearless person embraces even death without any kind of hesitation." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension and man began to lose control of it." - Václav Havel

"You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century—when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all—and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?" - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"Life means that I can live to see tomorrow." - Tokugawa Ieyasu

"This earth is a garden, this life a banquet, and it's time we realized that it was given to all life, animal and man, to enjoy." - Tom Brown, Jr.

"I like painting myself in corners and seeing if I can get out." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins