This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm
The subtle is what is basic and the manifest is its result. The subtler has power to transform the gross but not vice versa.
Edith Sitwell, fully Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.
Art | Daring | Evil | Existence | Good | Honor | Indifference | Judgment | Man | Nothing | Opinion | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Receive | Art | Learn | Vice |
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves.
Circumstance | Vice |
Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails and impious men bear away, The post of honor is a private station.
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
We must make up for the… brevity of life by heightening the intensity of life.
The non-spatial nature of consciousness makes it possible for any apparently unconscious entity to be conscious, and vice versa.
Consciousness | Nature | Vice |