This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
As the prudent vintager eats only ripe grapes, and gathers not those which are green, so the eyes of a wise man rests only upon the virtue of others; whereas the eyes of the fool seeks only to discover in his neighbor vices and defects.
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
There is no inherent authority of `truth’ to any concept except for the subjective value ascribed to it. Credibility is a subjective decision and purely experiential and indefinable. What is convincing to one person may be dismissed as nonsense by another. The realization and knowingness of God is radically and purely subjective. There is not even the hypothetical possibility that reason could arrive at Truth. Truth is knowable only by virtue of the identity of being it.
Authority | Decision | God | Nonsense | Reason | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | God | Value |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
That which is `provable’ is not Reality but perception or mentation only. Reality is subjective and knowable only by virtue of identity with the known. “Provables’ belong to the classification and level of limitation and are arbitrary abstractions whose sole `reality’ is merely the consequence of selection and identification. The phenomenal is not the same as the noumenal [understood by intellectual intuition without the aid of the senses – opposed to phenomenon.]
Paradoxically, then, the best life to live will be one that is constantly struggling to become a different sort of life, a life with more virtue and less enjoyment, with more to admire and less to envy. If that best of lives were to succeed in becoming what it strives to change itself into, however, it would not longer be the best of lives. It would then be a life purely of self-sacrifice, an unenviable life suitable only for admiration. So what life should we seek, then? If what we are asking is either what kind of life to seek in order to gain a purely enviable life, or what kind of life to seek in order to achieve a purely admirable life, for those questions, the answer is fairly easy. Only a life with both elements resonates with a full portion of good. And that life, I think we have to recognize, will also be a life in which the two types of good remain in tension; a life in which the enviable and the admirable are never quite reconciled.
Admiration | Change | Enjoyment | Envy | Good | Life | Life | Order | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Think |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Sensuality is the vice of young men and of old nations.
Men | Nations | Sensuality | Old | Vice |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
The true master understands that enlightenment is not the end but the means. Realizing that virtue is her goal, she accepts the long and often arduous cultivation that is necessary to attain it. She doesn’t scheme to become a leader, but quietly shoulders whatever responsibilities fall to her. Unattached to her accomplishments, taking credit for nothing at all, she guides the whole world by guiding the individuals who come to her. she share her divine energy with her students, encouraging them, creating trials to strengthen them, scolding them to awaken them, directing the streams of their lives toward the infinite ocean of the Tao.
Credit | Cultivation | Energy | Enlightenment | Means | Nothing | Trials | Virtue | Virtue | World |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
The chaff from winnowing will blind a man’s eyes so that he cannot tell the points of the compass. Mosquitoes will keep a man awake all night with their biting. And just in the same way this talk of charity and duty to one’s neighbor drives me nearly crazy. Sir! strive to keep the world to its own simplicity. And as the wind bloweth where it listeth, so let virtue establish itself. Wherefore such undue energy, as though searching for a fugitive with a big drum?
Charity | Duty | Energy | Man | Simplicity | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World |
Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.
The worst type of sin, in fact the only “mortal sin” which has enslaved man for the greater part of history, is the institutionalized sin. Under the institution, vice appears to be, or is actually turned into, virtue. Apathy toward evil is thus engendered; recognition of sin becomes totally effaced; sinful institutions become absolutized, almost idolized, and sin becomes absolutely moral.
Apathy | Evil | History | Man | Mortal | Sin | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |