This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Power is, therefore, a word which we may use both in an active and in a passive signification; and in psychology we may apply it both to the active faculty and to the passive capacity of the mind.
Absolute | Ends | Indifference | Knowledge | Reason | Science | Truths |
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by imitating others.
We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not so.
You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them -- especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to your state or temper or occurrences in life. But the Spirit of Love is not in you till it is the spirit of your life, till you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it.
Evil | God | Good | Love | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Revenge | Sin | Temper | Vengeance | Work | God |
William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne
Upon this principle I imagine it is that some of the finest pieces of antiquity are written in the dialogue manner. Plato and Tully, it should seem, thought truth could never be examined with more advantage than amidst the amicable opposition of well-regulated converse.
Absurd | Circumstances | Contrast | Conversation | Friend | Language | Learning | Lord | Method | Reason | Spirit | Strength | Wonder | World |
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.
Absolute | Ambition | Blush | Education | Feelings | Honor | Individual | Men | Pride | Question | Race | Reason | Right | Shame | System | Time | Worth | Ambition | Old |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
We already have the Wooden Pillar, the Steel Pillar and the Plastic Pillar. In a moment we will have the Golden Bail... No, you won't.' We will,' stated the robot simply. No, you won't. It makes my ship work.' In a moment,' repeated the robot patiently, 'we will have the Golden Bail... You will not,' said Zaphod. And then we must go,' said the robot, in all seriousness, 'to a party.' Oh,' said Zaphod, startled, 'can I come?' No,' said the robot, 'we are going to shoot you.' Oh, yeah?' said Zaphod, waggling his gun. Yes,' said the robot, and they shot him. Zaphod was so surprised that they had to shoot him again before he fell down.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
Slugs crawl and crawl over our cabbages, like the world's slander over a good name. You may kill them, it is true; but there is the slime.
Reason |