This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute her laws. That is the healthful condition of the moral life; on the other hand, enthusiasm, even when excited by representation of goodness, is a brilliant but feverish flow which leaves only exhaustion and languor behind." - Immanuel Kant
"Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise." - Immanuel Kant
"How are space, time and that which fills both, the object of sensation, possible in general? The answer is: by means of the quality of our sensibility, according to which it is affected, in its peculiar way, by objects which are in themselves unknown and quite different from those appearances." - Immanuel Kant
"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." - Immanuel Kant
"Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful." - Immanuel Kant
"The permanent in phenomena must be regarded as the substratum of all determination of time, and consequently also as the condition of the possibility of all synthetical unity of perceptions, that in time can only be regarded as a mode in the existence of that which abides unchangeably. Therefore, in all phenomena, the permanent is the object in itself." - Immanuel Kant
"Duty is the necessity of acting out of respect for the law... An action from duty must eliminate entirely the influence of inclinations and thus every object of the will." - Immanuel Kant
"Metaphysics has for the real object of its investigation three ideas only: God, Freedom and Immortality." - Immanuel Kant
"Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repel." - James Bryant Conant
"Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels." - James Bryant Conant
"We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty and charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open. So many people seem to go about their life’s business with their eyes shut. Indeed, they object to other people keeping their eyes open. Unable to lay themselves, they dislike the play of others." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible - truer than the truth." - Jean Anouilh, fully Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh
"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign asters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light." - Jeremy Bentham
"The general object which all laws have, or ought to have, in common, is to augment the total happiness of the community; and therefore, in the first place, to exclude, as far as may be, every thing that tends to subtract from the happiness: in other words, to exclude mischief." - Jeremy Bentham
"Listening brings about intensity. The greatest intensity - as experienced in love - is that of becoming one... Seeing is not possible without separating into subject and object. Someone listening, however, takes in, dissolving separation. Hearing disperses 'isolation'." - Joachim-Ernst Berendt
"The fact that the eye constantly thrusts outwards distracts us from self-knowledge and the way inwards. It dissipates attention... The eye says I. We sense when someone is looking at us. Their gaze insists: Pay attention to me! Almost everyone is also aware of that when the observer is standing behind us. We notice after a while. Someone is there. Who is it? Who would not, however, know if someone were listening to us if he or she did not say so. The listener does not put the emphasis on himself or event the other person. He does not insist on a separation between subject and object. The ear establishes a 'more correct' relationship between ourselves and others. It implies unity rather than division. Eye and ear need one another. Ear and eye are not alternatives." - Joachim-Ernst Berendt
"Few persons realize how much of their happiness is dependent upon their work, upon the fact that they are kept busy and not left to freed upon themselves. Happiness comes most to persons who seek her least, and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought; it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you, and not your overtake it." - John Burroughs
"Our object in life should be to accumulate a great number of questions to be asked and resolved in eternity. Now we ask the sage, the genius, the philosopher, the divine, but none can tell; but we will open our queries to other respondents - we will ask angels, redeemed spirits, and God." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness an crookedness is our own. the wisdom of god created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the ye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glitterings, what is that to truth?" - John Milton
"The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right thing, but enjoy the right things; not merely industrious, but to love industry; not merely learned, but to love knowledge; not merely pure, but to love purity; not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice." - John Ruskin
"As soon as mankind have unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth perish within them? The highest aim and best result of improved intelligence, is has hitherto been thought, is to unite mankind more and more in the acknowledgment of all important truths; and does the intelligence only last as long as it has not achieved its object? Do the fruits of conquest perish by the very completeness of the victory?" - John Stuart Mill
"It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to." - John Stuart Mill
"Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others; on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means but as itself an ideal end. Aiming this at something else, they find happiness by the way... Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life." - John Stuart Mill
"Happiness is the test of al rules of conduct and the end of life. But… this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy, I thought, who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way." - John Stuart Mill
"If gratitude, when exerted towards another, naturally produces a very pleasing sensation in the mind of a grateful man, it exalts the soul into rapture when it is employed on this great object of gratitude to the beneficent Being who has given us everything we already possess, and from whom we expect everything we hope for." - Joseph Addison
"Admiration is a very short-lived passion that decays on growing familiar with its object unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by perpetual miracles rising up into its view." - Joseph Addison
"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed... In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come to be the sheer alienation of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being has been reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world." - Karl Marx
"The overcoming of private property means the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it means this emancipation precisely because these senses and qualities have become human both subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object derived from and for the human being. The senses have therefore become theoreticians immediately in their practice. They try to relate themselves to their subject matter for its own sake, but the subject matter itself is an objective human relation to itself and to the human being, and vice versa. Need or satisfaction have thus lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use." - Karl Marx
"The main fact about education is that there is no such thing. Education is a word like "transmission" or "inheritance"; it is not an object, but a method." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of a superior genius." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
"When the perfect man is... near death, his knowledge increases mightily... and his love for the object of his knowledge becomes more intense, and it is in this great delight that his soul separates from his body." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"When we continually see an object, however sublime it may be, our regard for it will be lessened, and the impression we have received of it will be weakened." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Even if the Universe existed for man’s sake and man existed for the purpose of serving God, one must still ask: What is the end of serving God? He does not become more perfect if all His creatures serve Him. Nor would he lose anything if nothing existed beside Him. It might perhaps be replied that the service of God is not intended for God’s perfection, but for our own. Then, however, the question arises: What is the object of our being perfect? Pressing the inquiry as to the purpose of Creation, we must at last arrive at the answer: it was the will of God. Logic as well as tradition prove clearly that the Universe does not exist for man’s sake, but that all things in it exist each for its own sake." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Let war be so carried on that no other object may seem to be sought but the acquisition of peace." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Scurrility has no object in view but incivility; if it is uttered from feelings of petulance, it is mere abuse; if it is spoken in a joking manner, it may be considered raillery." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"What is human love? What is its purpose? It is the desire for union with a beautiful object in order to make eternity available to mortal life." - Marsilio Ficino
"The object of religion is conduct; and conduct is really, however men may overlay it with philosophical disquisitions, the simplest thing in the world. That is to say, it is the simplest thing in the world as far as understanding is concerned; as regards doing, it is the hardest thing in the world." - Matthew Arnold
"The philosopher should be a man willing to listen to every suggestion, but determined to judge for himself. He should not be a respecter of persons, but of things. Truth should be his primary object." - Michael Faraday
"Public instruction should be the first object of government." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us on a wild goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we caught happiness without dreaming of it." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Tenderness, without a capacity of relieving, only makes the man who reels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love, neither himself nor his own thins, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another." - Plato NULL
"For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it... All history is the history of thought." - R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
"All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Morality is the object of government." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All things are engaged in writing their history... Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every moment instructs, and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after long time." - Ralph Waldo Emerson