This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Evolution begins and ends with the purposes of God." - Henry Fairfield Osborn
"Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics." - Charles Pierre Péguy
"Most people think the future is the ends and the present is the means. In fact, the present is the ends and the future the means." - Fritz Jules Roethlisberger
"In the long run we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
"Most religions are absolutist. Claims to revelation militate against rational argument and compromise. In this sense all religions contain totalitarian possibilities; for totalitarianism, which welds the state into a single body “knit together as one man” is really the religious impulse, the worship of leadership and ideology, the cult of Person or Book, directed towards secular ends." - Malise Ruthven
"Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovering." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood." - William Shenstone
"The machine is one of the most compelling rational of human discoveries. The madness is in those who would use a rational thing to further the irrational ends of exploitation and domination." - Gregory Vlastos
"Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It also is the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passions and uncensorable appetites. From the need to resist, manage and censor the passions there flows the need to do so in the interest of some ends rather than others. Hence freedom requires reflective choice about the ends of life." -
"Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing." - Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
"Perfectionists and zealots can break but not bend; in my experience they are subject to burnout from diminishing returns or else, to borrow Santayana's definition of the fanatic, they redouble their efforts just when they have lost sight of their ends." - Christopher Hitchens
"One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Nature gave men two ends - one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most." - George Ross Kirkpatrick
"The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others." - John Locke
"An integral part of possessing a genuine moral clarity may be to recognize that rarely, if ever, does any moral situation boil down to an instance of absolute good versus absolute evil...Genuine moral clarity involves ceaseless and rigorous questioning and evaluation of one's works and deeds and ends in life, and the means one chooses to realize one's works and deeds and ends." - Christopher R. Phillips
"War ends nothing." - Mongo Proverbs
"Ultimately, what leads to wise choices is love—the attention to others as ends in themselves, as I am an end in myself, not a means to an end. The way love is implemented and practiced is care, which is attending to the true needs of others. So wise choices come about through care." - Paul G. Schervish
"A significant life - one that is more than just happy or meaningful - requires dedication to ends that we choose because they exceed the goal of personal well-being. We attain and feel our significance in the world when we create, and act for, ideals that may originate in self-interest, but ultimately benefit others." - Irving Singer
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
"He who forgives ends the quarrel." - African Proverbs
"“Ends” are mere appearances, landmarks strewn haphazard along a path whose issue is hidden from you." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"All men seek one goal: success or happiness. The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal - a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends - wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end." - Aristotle NULL
"When we deliberate it is about means and not ends." - Aristotle NULL
"Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?" - Arthur Asher Miller
"True creativity often starts where language ends." - Arthur Koestler
"Man - every man - is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others. He must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing other to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"All moral rules must be tested by examining whether they tend to realize ends that we desire. I say ends that we desire, not ends that we ought to desire... Outside human desires there is no moral standard." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Laziness grows on people; it begins in cobwebs, and ends in iron chains. The more one has to do the more he is able to accomplish." - Charles Buxton
"Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship - never." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship never." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Great men often obtain their ends by means beyond the grasp of vulgar intellect, and even by methods diametrically opposite to those which the multitude would pursue. But, to effect this, bespeaks as profound a knowledge of mind as that philosopher evinced of matter, who first produced ice by the agency of heat" - Charles Caleb Colton
"Treat others as ends, never as means." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Where mystery begins religion ends." - Edmund Burke
"Men may be known six different ways, viz. – 1. by their countenances; 2. their words; 3. their actions; 4. their tempers; 5. their ends; and 6. by the relation of others." - Francis Bacon
"Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means." - Francis Hutcheson
"Life as a sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. Many diverse details have a bearing on the preservation of life, and when we have our eyes on the future we have to engage ourselves in these details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now, the future is not absolute but ever exposed to accident. Hence it is only the necessity of the immediate present which can justify a wrong action, because not to do the action would in turn be to cause not to do the action would in turn be to commit an offense, indeed the most wrong of all offenses, namely the complete destruction of the embodiment of freedom." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Every attempt at social leveling ends with leveling to the bottom, never to the top." - George F. Kennan
"Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends." - George Santayana
"Human life, because it is marked by a beginning and an end, becomes whole, an entirety in itself that can be subjected to judgment only when it has ended in death. Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from hazardous flux to which all things human are subject." - Hannah Arendt
"Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; to the one it is exceedingly long, to the other exceedingly short." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Men are not rational beings, as commonly supposed. A man is a bundle of instincts, feelings, sentiments, which severally seek their gratification and those which are in power get hold of the reason and use it to their own ends, and exclude all other sentiments and feelings of power." - Herbert Spencer
"Time: That which people are always trying to kill, but which ends in killing them." - Herbert Spencer
"Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity." - Herman Melville