This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.
Existence | Fulfillment | Meditation | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Will |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy fro the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
Assertion | Esteem | Existence | Joy | Love | Self | Self-esteem | Happiness |
Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
When he perceivith the diversified existence of being as rooted in One, and spreading forth from it, then he reaches the Eternal.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
The sense of existence is the greatest happiness.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time.
Beauty | Eternal | Existence | Failure | God | Heaven | Imagination | Life | Life | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Time | Truth | Failure | God |
We may doubt the existence of matter, if we please, and like Berkeley deny it, without subjecting ourselves to the shame of a very conclusive confutation; but there is this remarkable difference between matter and mind, that he that doubts the existence of mind, by doubting proves it.
The Portal of God is Non-Existence. All things sprang from Non-Existence. Existence could not make existence existence. It must have proceeded from Non-Existence. And Non-Existence and Nothing are one.
Existence | God | Non-existence | Nothing | God |
Anything and everything in existence can be mastered when all effort is relaxed and the mind is absorbed in the infinite unbounded nature of consciousness. And then we are no longer upset by the play of opposites. And life is lived in freedom and joy.
Consciousness | Effort | Existence | Freedom | Joy | Life | Life | Mind | Nature | Play |
People and societies who cannot see any purpose in their existence beyond the material and the tangible must live chartlessly, and must live in spiritual misery, because they cannot overcome the greatest fact and mystery of human life, next to birth, which is death.
Birth | Death | Existence | Life | Life | Mystery | People | Purpose | Purpose |
Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Mere customary life (the watch wound up and going on of itself) is that which brings on natural death. Custom is activity without opposition, for which there remains only a formal duration; in which the fullness and zest that originally characterized the aim of life are out of the question - a merely external sensuous existence which has ceased to throw itself enthusiastically into its object.
Custom | Death | Existence | Life | Life | Object | Opposition | Question |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Man, finite when regarded for himself, is yet at the same time the image of god and a fountain of infinity in himself. He is the object of his own existence - has in himself an infinite value, an eternal destiny.
Destiny | Eternal | Existence | God | Man | Object | Time | God |
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
The sole means now for the savings of the beings on the planet Earth would be to implant into their presences a new organ with such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence and also the tendency to hate others which flows from it - the tendency, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them themselves and for the whole Universe.
Attention | Cause | Death | Destroy | Earth | Existence | Hate | Means | Sense | Universe |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite - Matter. As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom... Matter has its essence outside itself; Spirit is Being-within-itself (self-contained existence). But this, precisely, is Freedom. For if I am dependent, I refer myself to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of Spirit is none other than self-consciousness - consciousness of one’s own being.
Consciousness | Existence | Freedom | Nature | Self | Spirit |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind. Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks; and in truth whoever shall go about to divide his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task.
Abstract | Existence | Ideas | Mind | Nothing | Soul | Spirit | Time | Truth | Will |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a world all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit - it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit.
Earth | Eternal | Existence | Heaven | Important | Man | Mind | Need | Spirit | World | Absurdity | Truths |