This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
Freedom is obtained not by the enjoyment of what is desired but by controlling desire itself.
It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
Desire |
The Occasion of the imagined Difficulty in conceiving disinterested Desires, has probably been from the attempting to define this simple Idea, Desire. It is called an uneasy Sensation in the absence of Good. Whereas Desire is as distinct from any Sensation, as the Will is from the Understanding or Senses. This every one must acknowledge, who speaks of desiring to remove Uneasiness or Pain.
Absence | Desire | Difficulty | Good | Pain | Understanding | Will |
Goodness answers to the theological virtue charity, and admits no excess but error. The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall. But in charity there is no excess; neither can angel or man come in danger by it.
Angels | Charity | Danger | Desire | Error | Excess | Knowledge | Man | Power | Virtue | Virtue | Danger |
The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater our desire to be like others.
Desire |
It is the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.
It is a strange desire to seek power and lose liberty.
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation says ‘I’. And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs to the Whole, to the whole man, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversion is expressed by this Whole. In actual fact, there is no foundation whatever for this assumption. Man’s every thought and desire appears and lives quite separately and independently of the Whole. And the Whole never expresses itself, for the simple reason that it exists, as such, only physically as a thing, and in the abstract as a concept.
We have two tyrannous physical passions: concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of sex: we become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost; unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves.
Friends must desire to live as much as possible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures. Good-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give spiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be indifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them, and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human medium through which it beheld the good.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything.
There is not a person we employ who does not, like ourselves, desire recognition, praise, gentleness, forbearance, patience.
Desire | Forbearance | Gentleness | Patience | Praise |
Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.
Ambition | Capacity | Desire | Destroy | Effort | Human nature | Man | Nature | Slavery |
A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.