This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Hard as it is for us to escape the effects of our own feelings, nobody seems to have difficulty in rejecting the feelings of others as merely subjective and vulnerable to interference from the demons of self-deception and self-delusion.
Delusion | Difficulty | Feelings | Self | Self-deception |
Thou wilt never escape from thy self until thou slay it. Thy self, which is keeping thee far from God, and saying “So-and-so has treated me ill… such a one has done well by me” - all this is polytheism; nothing depends upon the creatures, all upon the Creator.
Human beings seek a prior meaning in everything as a defense against doubts about the importance of anything, including man's existence ... To affirm that there is a supreme meaning of life is to give the intellect an opportunity to escape the disquieting conclusion that nothing people do can possibly have more than slight importance.
Defense | Existence | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Nothing | Opportunity | People | Intellect |
We are by nature thinking beings, and if we cannot escape anxiety about the inherent structure of our thought processes, how can we hope to creative purposive ideals that are congruent with reality instead of deflecting us from it?
Anxiety | Anxiety | Hope | Ideals | Nature | Reality | Thinking | Thought | Thought |
The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.
Destiny | Life | Life | Tragedy | Unhappiness |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
Desire | Loneliness | Love | Means | Men |
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Day |
It is to escape responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
Failure | Responsibility | Failure |