| SPIRIT OF THE WORLD |
| MANY VOICES / ONE TRUTH |
| Gathered and organized and introduced by
JoAnn Kite
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| Take a few minutes to click through and explore this revealing masterpiece of visionary spiritual synopsis |
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THE GREAT THOUGHTS
George Seldes, compiler
From Abelard to Zola, from ancient Greece to contemporary America, the ideas that have shaped the history of the world.
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| 1 |
"God is a verb, not a noun." R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), American architect, writer, 'No More Secondhand God'
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| 2 |
"Consciousness of God is self-consciousness. Knowledge of God is self-knowledge." Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), German philosopher, 'The Essence of Christianity'
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| 3 |
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918), Russian author, Nobel Prize 1970, 'The Gulap Archipelago'
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| 4 |
"There is only one way for a man to be true to himself. If he does not know what is good, a man cannot be true to himself." Confucius (551-479 bce), Chinese sage, 'The Doctrine of Mean'
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| 5 |
"A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love." Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, 'On Friendship'
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| 6 |
"The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due." Justinian I (483-565 ad), Byzantine emperor, 'The Institutes of Justinian', Title I, bk. 1
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| 7 |
"I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite…I want them all, all the gods. They are all God." D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), British writer, 'The Letters of D. H. Lawrence'
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| 8 |
"Morality is the observance of the rights of others." Dagobert D. Runes (1902-1982), American philosopher, 'Treasury of World Literature'
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| 9 |
"Creativity cannot exist without the feminine principle, and I am sure God is not merely male or female but He-She – our Father-Mother God." Margaret Walker (b. 1915), American teacher
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| 10 |
"Love a man even in his sin for that love is a likeness of the divine love, and is the summit of love on earth." Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881), Rusian novelist, 'The Brothers Karamazov', Bk. VI, Ch. 3
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| 11 |
"For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly." Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher, Nobel Prize winner, 1927, 'Creative Evolution'
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| 12 |
"The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its suroundings." Rachel Carson (1907-1964), American naturalist, author, 'The Edge of the Sea'
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| 13 |
"Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows like harmony in music; there is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements." William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet, 'The Prelude'
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| 14 |
"To live without love I think is impossible, happily impossible for each one of us." Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentine author, 'Blindness'
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| 15 |
"It is a world cooperative commonwealth at which we ought to aim, built on freedom. A single country – or a group of countries – with this peaceful cooperative aim can make its impact on the whole world." David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Polish-born Israeli prime minister, New York Times Magazine, September 24, 1961
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| 16 |
"Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the whole world." Antoine DeSaint-Exupery (1900-1944), French author, 'Wind, Sand, and Stars'
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| 17 |
"The question was once put to him [Aristotle], how we ought to behave to our friends; and the answer he gave was, 'As we should wish our friends to behave to us.'" Diogenes Laertius (fl. 200 ad), Biographer of Greek philosophers, 'Aristotle'
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| 18 |
"I believe in God, whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all." Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian author, 'Reply to Synod's Edict of Excommunication'
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| 19 |
"I believe in the fundamental Truth of all the great religions of the world. I believe that they are all God-given." Mohandes Gandhi (1869-1948), Hindu national leader, 'Harijan (a weekly
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| 20 |
"Use love to motivate you and obligate you to serve the human family." Jesse Jackson (b. 1941), American minister, political leader, address to the Democratic National Convention, 1984
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| 21 |
"Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star. Intuitively he had sensed the enormous interlinked complexity of life." Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), American anthropologist, 'How Flowers Changed the World'
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| 22 |
"Then she (Philosophy personified) said…I assert that there is no such thing as chance and I declare that chance is just an empty word with no real meaning. For what place can be left for purposelessness when God puts all things in order?" Boethius (ca. 480-524), Roman philosopher, 'The Consolation of Philosophy'
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| 23 |
"We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations, and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of Being." Vaclav Havel (b. 1936), Czech playwright, President of the Czech Republic, commencement address, Harvard University, June 8, 1995
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| 24 |
"It is forbidden to decry other sects; the true believer gives honor to whatever in them is worthy of honor." Asoka (d. 238 bce), Buddhist emperor of India, Decree (inscription on a pillar),
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| 25 |
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, 'lighthouses' (as a poet said) 'erected in the sea of time.' They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print." 'Authors League Bulletin', November-December 1979
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All quotes, by category
We are gathering together the primary insights of spirituality and bringing them together into one place.
This archive contains 11,754 quotes, taken from 635 references,
organized in terms of 39 primary categories. Quotes are randomized and appear in a different way at every click.
Explore the navigation options to review these insights.
We include
- All major spiritual and religious traditions, from all cultures, and all historical epochs
- Major psychologists, philosophers, writers, scholars and leading religious personalities
- Sources in classical religion as well as voices from new consciousness, esotericism and mysticism
- Choices are guided by the spirit of oneness, love, kindness, inclusion and community
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2,838,804
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