This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
Admiration | Envy | Fame | Mankind | Pleasure |
To be an object of hatred and aversion to their contemporaries has been the usual fate of all those whose merit has raised them above the common level. The man who submits to the shafts of envy for the sake of noble objects pursues a judicious course for his own lasting fame. Hatred dies with its object, while merit soon breaks forth in full splendor, and his glory is handed down to posterity in never-dying strains.
Envy | Fame | Fate | Glory | Man | Merit | Object | Posterity | Fate |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good, are the two most important aims of philosophy.
Aims | Discovery | Good | Important | Philosophy | Practice | Discovery |
Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate.
Imagination | World |
Émile Durkheim, fully David Émile Durkheim
A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt. If it cannot discover the claims to existence of the objects of its questioning -- and it would be miraculous if it so soon succeeded in solving so many mysteries -- it will deny them all reality, the mere formulation of the problem already implying an inclination to negative solutions. But in so doing it will become void of all positive content and, finding nothing which offers it resistance, will launch itself perforce into the emptiness of inner revere.
Doubt | Enough | Existence | Ignorance | Inclination | Mind | Nothing | Reality | Will |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas. But if I too have failed to convey all that has been tormenting me for the last six months, it will, anyway, be understood that I have paid very dearly for attaining my present "last conviction." This is what I felt necessary, for certain objects of my own, to put forward in my "Explanation". However, I will continue.
Eugène Delacroix, fully Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix
Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask: What up to now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by their sequence they will yield to you a basic law of your true self. Compare them and see how they form a ladder on which you have so far climbed up toward yourself.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
Jealousy |
In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate ‘things’ and ‘events’ are realities of nature is an illusion.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Although Freedom is, primarily, an undeveloped idea, the means it uses are external and phenomenal; presenting themselves in History to our sensuous vision. The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action — the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind — benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality. When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not ,only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will — a moral embitterment — a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections.
Action | Aims | Belief | Benevolence | Consequences | Discipline | Display | Freedom | Good | History | Influence | Justice | Law | Man | Means | Men | Mind | Morality | Order | Power | Reason | Respect | Sorrow | Spirit | Will | Work | World | Respect |
When men acquire something, they never get only what they desire and nothing more; when men reject something, they never rid themselves only of what they hate and nothing more. Therefore, when men act, it must be on the basis of some scale or standard. If a balance is not properly adjusted, then heavy objects will rise in the air and men will suppose they are light, and light objects will sink down so that men suppose they are heavy. Hence men become deluded as to the true weight of the objects.
Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
Primal people see the objects of this world not (or not only) as solid but as open windows to their divine source.
From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.
Jacques Barzun, fully Jacques Martin Barzun
Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable; it can only be, as it were, inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.
Rest |