This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore the object must be eliminated from the picture.
Appearance | Beauty | Object | Beauty |
Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty. the more this union with the universal is felt, the more individual subjectivity declines.
Aesthetic | Individual | Life | Life |
Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
The flatterer is always covertly on the watch for some emotion to pamper. Are you angry? Punish them. Do you crave anything? Buy it. Are you afraid? Flee. Are you suspicious? Give it credence.
No good purpose has ever been served by disturbing the nerves of our little ones with the emotion of fear. A child, for example, may suffer more from the fear of a fall than from the fall itself. While it is true that the early steps of a child must be watched, and its early experiences guided, yet a guardianship based on the instilling of fear into the young soul, is far more harmful than any baleful experience which the unguarded child may encounter. It is seldom that an accident befalls a child through its own lack of care or experience ; the instinct for self-preservation works strongly and unconsciously from the very earliest stages of childhood. God has created His creatures with the necessary provisions for the protection of life.
Accident | Care | Experience | Fear | God | Good | Instinct | Little | Purpose | Purpose | Self-preservation | God | Child |
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
Art | Experience | Good | Art |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
Emotions |
The word love was sublime childishness. And, whatever the passion I feel in the sequel, never not be possible emotion of seeing a lovely girl of nineteen crying because she is too old.
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on it's own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run behind the scenes by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe
Appreciation | Awe | Beauty | God | Phenomena | Reason | Religion | Appreciation | Beauty | God | Learn | Think |
R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing it is therefore an exploration of his own emotions. He is trying to find out what these emotions are.
All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people—the great gray apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.
Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence.
Compassion | Right |
If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason, surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must be also? Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the interests of reason herself. The Professors of Unreason deny that they undervalue reason: none can be more convinced than they are, that if the double currency cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human reason, the double currency should cease forthwith; but they say that it must be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive that admirable faculty of the one-half of its own existence. Unreason is a part of reason; it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological [expectations] of the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature.