This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Precisely because the form is as essential to the essence as the essence to itself, absolute reality must not be conceived and expressed as essence alone, i.e. as immediate substance or pure self-contemplation of the divine, but as form also, and in the whole wealth of the developed form. Only then is it grasped and expressed as really actual. The Truth is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.
Absolute | Contemplation | Nothing | Reality | Self | Truth | Wealth |
Deep ecology is supported by modern science... but it is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation. When the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual.
Awareness | Change | Consciousness | Individual | Life | Life | Oneness | Perception | Reality | Science | Sense | Spirit | Awareness |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.
Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
Imagination | Universe | Wisdom |
Where bright imagination reigns, the fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains.
Imagination | Spirit |
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
Beauty | Better | Contemplation | Faith | Hope | Imagination | Love | Nature | Science | Taste | Beauty | Contemplation | Understand |
The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
Imagination | Soul |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.
Reality |
The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!
Faith | Imagination |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are able to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.
A man's character is the reality of himself. His reputation is the opinion others have formed of him. Character is in him; reputation is from other people - that is the substance, this is the shadow.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
We can never have enough of nature. We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.
Time is a necessary representation, lying at the foundation of all our intuitions. With regard to phenomena in general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well represent to ourselves time void of phenomena. Time is therefore given a priori. In it alone is all reality of phenomena possible. These may all be annihilated in thought, but in itself, as the universal condition of their possibility, cannot be so annulled.
Lying | Phenomena | Reality | Regard | Thought | Time | Think |
In order to arrive at the reality of outer objects I have just as little need to resort to inference as I have in regard to the reality of the object of my inner sense, that is, in regard to the reality of my thoughts. For in both cases alike the objects are nothing but represenations, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is at the same time a sufficient proof of their reality.
Consciousness | Little | Need | Nothing | Object | Order | Perception | Reality | Regard | Sense | Time |