This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
In the background of conscious life there is a multitude of cogitations. This background is not a vagueness beyond the reaches of analysis, a sort of fog within consciousness; it is a field already differentiated. One can distinguish in it various types of acts: acts of belief (the dawning of a genuine belief, a belief that precedes knowledge etc.) of pleasure or displeasure, of desire, etc.
Capability | Existence | Sense |
Success and happiness are the natural condition of mankind. It is actually easier for us to demonstrate these things than the reverse. Bad habits of thinking and acting may obscure this fact for a time, just as a wrong way of walking or sitting, or holding a pen or a musical instrument may seem to be easier than the proper way, because we have accustomed ourselves to it; but the proper way is the easier nevertheless.
Life | Life | Man | Power | Sense | Truth | Will | Woman | Friends |
Just to avoid the pursuit of which is true, to avoid the inevitable pursuit of the fittest. Incapable of non-justice, without justice is tyrannical power. Justice is not necessarily opposed the strength, because there are always bad people. Justice of the non-power remains in the dock. So, we need to combine strength with justice, fair to do so strong, you need to have a justice of the fittestÂ… justice open to debate. Understood at first sight, the unquestioned power. For this reason, we could not give strength to justice, because power, go against justice, he said it was fair.
Beauty | Giving | Imitation | Poetry | Sense | Writing | Beauty |
The beef is strong and powerful, he does not even know. It absorbs a multitude of plants, devouring pre, what a great advantage in going to remove it? He ruminates, it heavily floundering in the barn where encloses a sad man, heavy, useless as him. The man kills him, he eats, he will not be better, and after that beef is dead, the man dies. What will remain of both? some fertilizer that will produce new grass, and some grass feed of new flesh. How vain and dumb vicissitude of life and death! how cold world! And how is it that it is good instead of not?
The greatest power in the world is the power our thought, for it is Creative Mind in action.
Education | History | Sense | Skepticism |
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive
Capacity | Eternal | Individual | Lesson | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Men | Problems | Rank | Sense | Society | World | Society | Trouble |
There is the type of man who has great contempt for "imÂmediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withÂdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueÂness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and manÂkind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
Character | Creativity | Death | Defense | Defiance | Dread | Failure | Insanity | Life | Life | Looks | Means | Men | Misfortune | Nature | Parents | People | Price | Reality | Sense | Style | Tragedy | Will | Wonder | World | Misfortune | Failure |
We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as Andre Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible sufferÂing and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn't make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.
Comfort | Despair | Destroy | Doubt | Dread | Failure | Ideas | Joy | Life | Life | Little | Man | Reality | Self-knowledge | Sense | Failure |
Curiously, despite the importance Ecotopians attach to agriculture and other rural affairs, the Ecotopian constitution is city-based where ours, inherited from an agricultural era, is rural-based. With us, the states have broad powers over cities (including the right to give them legal existence and set their boundaries). The Ecotopian main cities, however, dominate their regions through a strict application of one-person-one-vote principles. Furthermore, the county level of government is omitted entirely.
Ecotopians … had always regarded anthropology as a field with great practical importance. After Independence they had begun to experiment in adapting anthropological hypotheses to real life. It was only over a great deal of resistance that a radical idea such as ritual warfare had become legally practicable … But its advocates had persisted, convinced … that it was essential to develop some kind of open civic expression for the physical competitiveness that seemed to be inherent in man’s biological programming – and otherwise came out in perverse forms, like war.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
What kind of a hand is that,' he said. 'Cramp then if you want. Make yourself into a claw. It will do you no good.
Sense |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
To which the senses retort; 'Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.'
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
In this communication I wish first to show in the simplest case of the hydrogen atom (nonrelativistic and undistorted) that the usual rates for quantization can be replaced by another requirement, in which mention of ‘whole numbers’ no longer occurs. Instead the integers occur in the same natural way as the integers specifying the number of nodes in a vibrating string. The new conception can be generalized, and I believe it touches the deepest meaning of the quantum rules.
Atheism | Experience | God | Good | Nothing | Pain | Price | Reason | Science | Sense | Space | World | God |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
Everybody knows that the butterfly emerges from the pupa, and the pupa from a quite different thing called a larva, and the larva from the butterfly's egg.
Man | Psychology | Sense | Soul |