This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
In this world, aspirants may find enlightenment by two different paths. For the contemplative is the path of knowledge: for the active is the path of selfless action. Nobody can become perfect by merely ceasing to act. In fact, nobody can ever rest from his activity even for a moment.
Action | Enlightenment | Knowledge | Rest | World |
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Public | Punishment |
Never expect to find perfection in men, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious hypocrites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They who raise suspicions on the good, on account of the behavior of ill men, are of the party of the latter.
Age | Behavior | Commerce | Daring | Duty | Evil | Fame | Good | Little | Men | Perfection | Public | Reputation | Sensibility | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Commerce |
An enlightened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us will identify with an interest more enlarged and public.
Public | Self | Self-interest | Will |
Personal interest is often the standard of our belief, as well as of our practice.
Moderation must not claim the merit of combating and conquering ambition; for they can never exist in the same subject. Moderation is the languor and sloth of the soul; ambition its activity and ardor.
Ambition | Merit | Moderation | Sloth | Soul | Moderation | Ambition |
Wisdom consists in the highest use of the intellect for the discernment of the largest moral interest of humanity. It is the most perfect willingness to do the right combined with the utmost attainable knowledge of what is right… Wisdom consists in working for the better from the love of the best.
Better | Discernment | Humanity | Knowledge | Love | Right | Wisdom | Intellect |
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 |
A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world begins with its general aim, the realization of the idea of spirit, only in an implicit form, that is, as nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of history (as already observed) is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one... This vast congeries of volitions, interest and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it.
Consciousness | History | Impulse | Instinct | Means | Nature | Object | Spirit | World |
Life is a short day; but it is a working-day. Activity may lead to evil; but inactivity cannot be led to good.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.
System |
Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
Love is the most freely willed of any activity of which we are able to think.
Love |