Great Throughts Treasury

"Even if the Universe existed for man’s sake and man existed for the purpose of serving God, one must still ask: What is the end of serving God? He does not become more perfect if all His creatures serve Him. Nor would he lose anything if nothing existed beside Him. It might perhaps be replied that the service of God is not intended for God’s perfection, but for our own. Then, however, the question arises: What is the object of our being perfect? Pressing the inquiry as to the purpose of Creation, we must at last arrive at the answer: it was the will of God. Logic as well as tradition prove clearly that the Universe does not exist for man’s sake, but that all things in it exist each for its own sake." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL

"Every fool thinks that life is there for his sake alone, and as though nothing existed but he. And so, when anything happens that opposes his wishes, he concludes that the whole universe is evil. But if man would regard the whole universe itself and realize what an infinitesimal part he plays in it, the truth would be clear and apparent to him." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL

"Some people assume that the Universe was created solely for the sake of man’s existence, that he might serve God. On examining this opinion, as intelligent persons ought to examine all different opinions, we will discover that it is erroneous." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL

"The material universe it… a message in code from God." - Malcolm Muggeridge

"We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

"All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been coordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe." -

"Every part of me will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on, forever. And by consequence of such a change, I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the other direction." -

"A man would have no pleasures in discovering all the beauties of the universe, even in heaven itself, unless he had a partner to whom he might communicate his joys." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"Once the concept of infinity has been taken seriously, a human dwelling can no longer be made of the universe. The universe can still be thought but it can no longer be imaged; the man who thinks it no longer really lives in it." - Martin Buber

"Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it." - Max Frisch

"Nothing in the universe is so like God as silence." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim

"Each of us should realize and should exhibit through our actions the following truth: Moral influence and ethical responsibility are more important and more forceful and more important and more forceful and more lasting than mere power. We are here to be moral forces in the universe, in the world of nations, in our communities and in our families." - Menachem Begin

"Need God, not in order to understand why, but in order to... give a meaning to the Universe." -

"It is only in solitude, when it has broken the thick crust of shame that separates us from one another and separates us all from God, that we have no secrets from God; only in solitude do we raise our hearts to the Heart of the Universe; only in solitude does the redeeming hymn of supreme confession issue from our soul." -

"Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual's purpose merges with the universal flow." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"No matter how much we strive to understand, ultimate reality will always remain hidden? Only if the search for truth is motivated by the desire to reach an absolute answer. The person looking for certainty is bound to be disappointed... If on the other hand we realize that the partial truths we uncover are all legitimate aspects of the unknowable universe, then we can learn to enjoy the search and derive from it the pleasure one gets from any creative act... One must painstakingly match one’s preconceptions against actual, ongoing experience to begin separating truth from illusion." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"The entire universe, as I see it, is the outward manifestation of Mind Energy, of spirit, or to use the older and better word, of God." - Milton Steinberg

"Mere knowledge alone will not enable us to solve the profound problems of life... Sympathy is an essential part of a right attitude to the riddles of the universe. You must tune up your heart to catch the music of the spheres." - Morris Raphael Cohen

"The men who have changed the universe have never accomplished it changing officials but always by inspiring the people." -

"Man must understand his universe in order to understand his destiny. Mystery, however, is a very necessary ingredient in our lives. Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis for man’s desire to understand. Who knows what mysteries will be solved in our lifetime, and what new riddles will become the challenge of the new generations? Science has not mastered prophesy. We predict too much for next year yet far too little for the next ten. Responding to challenge is one of democracy’s great strengths. Our successes in space lead us to hope that this strength can be used in the next decade in the solution of many of our planet’s problems." - Neil Armstrong, fully Neil Alden Armstrong

"How could anyone observe the mighty order with which our God governs the universe without feeling himself inclined… to practice all of virtues, and to the beholding of the Creator Himself, the source of all goodness, in all things and before all things?" -

"We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth." - Norman Cousins

"To practice the basic principles of good health, visualize yourself as sound, healthy and filled with vitality and boundless life of your Creator. Look upon yourself as the unique individual that you are. Get in harmony with the creative, life-giving, health-maintaining forces of the universe. Affirm peace, wholeness, and good health - and they will be yours." - Norman Vincent Peale

"Justice is the soul of the universe." - Omar Khayyám

"In seemingly empty space there is one Link, one Life eternal, which unites everything in the universe - animate and inanimate - one wave of Life flowing through everything." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism." - Paul Eldridge

"People had been trying to understand the universe through love ever since the beginning of time." - Paulo Coelho

"He gave man speech, and speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe; and science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind poured itself forth in all-prophetic song; and music lifted up the listening spirit until it walked, except from mortal care, Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the safe." - Peter De Vries

"If each of us can believe that he is working so that the Universe may be raised, in him and through him, to a higher level, then a new spring of energy will well forth in the heart of Earth's workers. The whole organism, overcoming a momentary hesitation, will draw its breath and press on with strength renewed." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"Love in all its subtleties is nothing more and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked of the heart of the elements by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"The universe is a collector and conservator, not of mechanical energy, as we supposed, but of persons. All round us, one by one, like a continual exhalation, “souls” break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"The stuff of the universe, woven in a single piece according to one and the same system, but never repeating itself from one point to another, represents a single figure." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous... In the infinite extent of the universe, it is a direction of the heart." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Religion is man’s sense of the disposition of the universe to himself." - Ralph Barton Perry

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they are called cause, operation and effect; or more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but we will call the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and the love of beauty. These three are equal. The poets are thus liberating gods. They are free and they make free." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Man is a piece of the universe made alive." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nothing in the universe so solid as a thought." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet, for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There are few fixtures in nature, The universe is fluid and volatile." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In the ultimate depth of being, we find ourselves no longer separate but, rather, part of the unity of the universe. That unity includes the sufferer and the suffering, and the healer and that which heals. Therefore, all acts of healing are ultimately our selves healing our Self." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert

"I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that may be wrong. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"We have come from somewhere and are going somewhere. The great architect of the universe never built a stairway that leads to nowhere." -

"Ideas define our place in the universe, our relations with other people; ideas determine what is important and what is not important, what is fair and what is not fair, what is worth believing and what is not worth believing. Ideas give life meaning." - Robert C. Solomon

"The highest endowments do not create - they only discover. All transcendent genius has the power to make us know this as utter truth. Shakespeare, Bethoveen - it is inconceivable that they have fashioned the works of their lives; they only saw and heard the universe that is opaque and dumb to us." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton

"The space of a needle's eye suffices for two friends, while the universe itself is not wide enough for two enemies." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron