This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pick-ax, or of one impression of the spade with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are levelled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The business of life, summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Impatience of study is the mental disease of the present generation.
England was nothing, compared to continental nations until she had become commercial…until about the middle of the last century, when a number of ingenious and inventive men, without apparent relation to each other, arose in various parts of the kingdom, succeeded in giving an immense impulse to all the branches of the national industry; the result of which has been a harvest of wealth and prosperity, perhaps without a parallel in the history of the world.
The enjoyer (jiva), the objects of enjoyment and the Ruler (Isvara)-the triad described by the knowers of Brahman-all this is nothing but Brahman. This Brahman alone, which abides eternally within the self, should be known. Beyond It, truly, there is nothing else to be known.
Body | Deeds | Enjoyment | Evil | Good | Knowledge | Means | Mind | Virtue | Virtue | Deeds |
The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
Acceptance | Ambiguity | Evil | Failure | Good | Means | Success | Understanding | Failure |
Simeon ben Lakish, or Shimon ben Lakish or Reish Lakish
The Torah is written with black fire on white fire.
Contemplation | Death | Evil | Prayer | Struggle | Will | Contemplation |
Imaginary good is boring. Real good is always new, marvelous, and intoxicating.
The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.
Absence | Evil | Extreme | Fear | Hunger | Initiative | Need | Public | Risk | Security | Soul |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and if they haven't died, they are still alive today.
Evil |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.
Body | Consciousness | Contemplation | Death | Distinction | Evil | Existence | Future | Grief | Guilt | Individual | Life | Life | Thought | Contemplation | Thought |
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.
Evil | Experience | Good | Heart | Infancy | Sacred | Will |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.
Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.