This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"God is love, and the object of love: herein lies the whole contribution of mysticism." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"The habit of reflecting gives an inner life, which all that we see animates and embellishes. In this disposition of the soul everything becomes an object of thought." - Carl Victor de Bonstetten
"Buddhist Sutra from Sanskrit “The Heart of the Prajnaparamita” - All dharmas are marked with emptiness; they are neither produced nor destroyed, neither defiled nor immaculate, neither increasing nor decreasing. Therefore, in emptiness there is neither form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor mental functioning, nor consciousness; no eye, or ear, or nose, or tongue, or body, or mind; no form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touchable, no object of mind, no realm of elements (from sight to mind-consciousness), no interdependent origins (from ignorance to death and decay), no extinction of death and decay, no suffering, no origination, no extinction, no path, no wisdom, no attainment." -
""Know thyself," said the old philosopher, "improve thyself," saith the new. Our great object in time is not to waste our passions and gifts on the things external that we must leave behind, but that we cultivate within us all that we can carry into the eternal progress beyond." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who, early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which extend, link after link, from earth to heaven." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports." - Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
"The will is never free - it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car - it can't steer." - Joyce Cary
"It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great." - William Ellery Channing
"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose, new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterward." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"If the aim of the military action is an equivalent for the political object, that action will in general diminish as the political object diminishes. The more this object comes to the front, the more will this be so. This explains how, without self-contradiction, there can be wars of all degrees of importance and energy, from a war of extermination down to a mere state of armed observation." - Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz
"I have always recognized that the object of business is to make money in an honorable manner. I have endeavored to remember that the object of life is to do good." - Peter Cooper
"Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, on of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite." - Victor Cousin
"Pride, like ambition, is sometimes virtuous and sometimes vicious, according the character in which it is found, and the object to which it is directed. As a principle, it is the parent of almost every virtue and every vice - everything that pleases and displeases in mankind; and as the effects are so very different, nothing is more easy than to discover, even to ourselves, whether the pride that produces them is virtuous or vicious the first object of virtuous pride is rectitude, and the next independence." - Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Broke
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"Most of what we object to as misconduct in children is a natural rebellion against the intrusion of an unimaginative adult despotism in their lives." - Floyd Dell
"The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then fix it in form." - Louis Delsarte, fully Louis J. Delsarte
"There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"The object of punishment is threefold: for just retribution; for the protection of society; for the reformation of the offender." - Tyron Edwards
"A life regardful of duty is crowned with an object, directed by a purpose, inspired by an enthusiasm, till the very humblest routine, carried out conscientiously for the sake of God is elevated into moral grandeur; and the very obscurest office, filled conscientiously at the bidding of God, becomes an imperial stage on which all the virtues play. To one who lies thus the insignificant becomes important, the unpleasant delightful, the evanescent eternal." -
"The object of living is work, experience, happiness. There is joy in work. All that money can do is buy us some one else's work in exchange for our own. There is no happiness in the realization that we have accomplished something." - Henry Ford
"Primary causes are unknown to us, but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy." - Joseph Fourier, fully Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
"At bottom, no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Devote each day to the object then in time, and every evening will find something done." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"I reverence the individual who understands distinctly what he wishes; who unweariedly advances, who knows the means conducive to his object, and can seize and use them." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"It is natural to man to regard himself as the object of the creation, and to think of all things in relation to himself, and the degree in which they can serve and be useful to him." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Faith is a practical habit, which like every other, is strengthened and increased by continual exercise. It is nourished by meditation, by prayer, and the devout perusal of the Scriptures; and the light which it diffuses becomes stronger and clearer by an uninterrupted converse with its object, and a faithful compliance with its dictates." -
"Wealth brings noble opportunities, and competence is a proper object of pursuit; but wealth, and even competence, may be bought at too high a price. Wealth itself has no moral attribute. It is not money, but the love of money, which is the root of all evil. It is the relation between wealth and the mind and the character of its possessor which is the essential thing." - George Stillman Hillard
"The sweetest type of heaven is home - nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day’s labor, and beckons us to its bosom; and life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansion prepared for us." -
"Genius is intensity. The man who gets anything worth having is the man who goes after his object as a bulldog goes after a cat - with every fiber in him tense with eagerness and determination." - Rufus Cecil Holman
"They change their sky not their mind who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
"The only connexion or relation of objects, which can lead us beyond the immediate impression of our memory and senses, is that of cause and effect; and that because ‘tis the only one, on which we can found a just inference from one object to another." - David Hume
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." - Thomas Jefferson
"I who am blind can give one hint to those who see - one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object yhou want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful." -
"Happiness is the supreme object of existence." - J. Gilchrist Lawson
"The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere." - Abraham Lincoln
"Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful." - James Russell Lowell
"War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory." - Douglas MacArthur
"Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy." - Alexander Maclaren
"To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-littler guessing game; the ideal is to suggest." - Stephane Mallarme, born Étienne Mallarmé
"This divination of the spiritual in the things of sense, and which expresses itself I the things of sense, is precisely what we call Poetry. Metaphysics too pursues a spiritual prey, but in a very different formal object. Whereas metaphysics stands in the line of knowledge and of the contemplation of truth, poetry stands in the line of making and of the delight procured by beauty. The difference is an all-important one, and one that it would be harmful to disregard. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence... Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order. Metaphysics isolates mystery in order to know it; poetry, thanks to the balances it constructs, handles and utilizes mystery as an unknown force." - Jacques Maritain
"I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind; as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business, pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do con amore." -
"The plays of natural lively children are the infancy of art. Children live in a world of imagination and feeling. They invest the most insignificant object with any form they please, and see in it whatever they wish to see." - Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
"All destiny begins with thinking. Responsibilities connected with the present duty. Duty of which leads to the balancing of the thought. One of the objects of life is to think without creating thoughts. That is without being attached to the object for which the thought is created and can be attained only when desire is self-controlled and directed by thinking. Until then, thoughts are created and are destiny." - Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival
"Consider what effect, which might conceivably have practical gearing, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object." - C. S. Peirce, fully Charles Sanders Peirce
"An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit." - Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL
"Not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture memory of that Original." - Plotinus NULL
"The doubts of love are never to be wholly overcome; they grow with its various anxieties, timidities, and tenderness, and are the very fruits of the reverence in which the admired object is beheld." - Jane Porter