Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Robert C. Solomon

American Philosophy Professor at University of Texas at Austin, Author

"Conscience doesn’t determine what we ought to do, it only reminds us of rules we have already accepted."

"Ideas define our place in the universe, our relations with other people; ideas determine what is important and what is not important, what is fair and what is not fair, what is worth believing and what is not worth believing. Ideas give life meaning."

"The self is a social construct, mutually defined with and through other people."

"Love is a process, not a serendipitous discovery."

"All trust involves vulnerability and risk, and nothing would count as trust if there were no possibility of betrayal."

"Building trust begins with an appreciation and understanding of trust, but it also requires practice and practices."

"Another question has been raised rather widely in Europe, in Japan as well as in the United States is what, to what extent will the euro become a reserve currency."

"Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment's deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries."

"Building trust means thinking about trust in a positive way."

"Building trust is no longer a matter of creating structures and practices within a single culture."

"Falling in love is a process of willful escalation? a matter of choice? conditioned by multiple decisions each of which leads you a little further."

"Chances are the movements of the euro as against the dollar will be relatively moderate."

"Familiarity can no longer be a necessary condition for trust."

"Building trust requires talking and thinking about trust."

"I read the postmodernists with some interest even with admiration. But when I read them, I always this horrible nagging that something absolutely essential is forgotten feeling. More is said that a person is a social product, or a confluence of forces or fragmented or marginalized and opening a whole new world of excuses."

"Gratitude, I want to suggest, is not only the best answer to the tragedies of life. It is the best approach to life itself. This is not to say, as I keep insisting, an excuse for quietism or resignation. It is no reason to see ourselves simply as passive recipients and not as active participants full of responsibilities. On the contrary, as Kant and Nietzsche among many others insisted, being born with talents and having opportunities imposes a heavy duty on us, to exercise those talents and make good use of those opportunities. It is also odd and unfortunate that we take the blessings of life for granted -- or insist that we deserve them -- but then take special offense at the bad things in life, as if we could not possibly deserve those. The proper recognition of tragedy and the tragic sense of life is not shaking one?s fist at the gods or the universe ?in scorn and defiance? but rather, as Kierkegaard writes in a religious context, ?going down on one?s knees? and giving thanks. Whether or not there is a God or there are gods to be thanked, however, seems not the issue to me. It is the importance and the significance of being thankful, to whomever or whatever, for life itself."

"In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe."

"Romantic love, we still read in Cosmopolitan, is a ?matter of chemistry?, an image that has its support in the writings of the greatest poets, in Shakespeare, for instance, and in Goethe, whose novel Elective Affinities has been prime reading in Europe for almost two centuries."

"So if the euro, if Euroland is to become a reserve center, if the euro is to become a reserve currency, Euroland will have to have a deficit in its overall balance of payments."

"So you can be pretty sure that central banks around the world will not start dumping dollars on the market in order to buy euros."

"If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it."

"Love is not as such irrational? but sometimes love crosses the line into irrationality and destructiveness."

"Many people are blind to trust, not so much to its benefits as to its nature and the practices that make it possible."

"Once there is a gap between having an emotion and naming that emotion, there is room for a very special kind of error. In reflection, we can be mistaken about our emotion as well as in our emotional response? we can also? decide that what we do feel is correct and what we think we 'ought' to feel is mistaken."

"On private transactions, I'll just go very quickly now, a major difference between the United States and Euroland is that in Europe banks are much more important in financial transactions than in the United States."

"Love can be understood only 'from the inside,' as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it."

"Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value--we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values."

"Some countries that are close to Europe that already hold Deutschemarks, clearly would automatically hold euros, those are countries in Eastern Europe mainly, a few countries in Africa."

"Spirituality can be severed from both vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banalities. Spirituality, I have come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life."

"The dollar is currently the principal reserve currency in the world."

"The dollar is the main private currency for investment purposes, for transactions purposes, as a vehicle currency as it's called."

"The dollar performs internationally all three functions of money, as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a standard of value."

"The dollar went up some eighty percent in real terms as I recall now or something like that - from '80 to '85."

"The idea is that in friendship what we do is we pick people who are going to reinforce, in some sense, our own conception of ourselves. So if I think of myself as intelligent, or I want to think of myself as intelligent, whether or not I pick a partner who is also intelligent, what is going to be essential is that it's going to be a partner who somehow expands my notion of my own intelligence, either by telling me all the time, perhaps, how intelligent I am, or maybe by always contradicting me in such a way that I can prove my intelligence with her or him.?"

"The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world - a lot of them in Russia as you all know I'm sure."

"The prices of all imports would rise if the dollar depreciates."

"The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity, is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once interviewed said, he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance, a feeling on top of it. It's like your life is yours to create. I've read the post-modernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a confluence of forces, or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete. It's you and me talking, making decisions, doing things, and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in the world, and counting. Nevertheless - what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. It makes a difference to other people, and it sets an example. And in short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are."

"There has been talk in Europe about American hegemony being somehow based upon the use of the dollar in the world. I just don't see that connection at all."

"There is a European Central Bank, of course, established and it has the structure similar to the Federal Reserve system, not precisely the same but similar."

"There's a stability and growth pact which was agreed for the eleven countries which tries to limit the size of budget deficits among the eleven countries."

"Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life."

"To whom one should feel this gratitude. As an emotion, gratitude is defined, at least in part, by its "object" namely the reception of a gift of some kind? If a good friend gives me a book, I am? grateful to him? But if spirituality need not include a belief in a personal God, then how can one be grateful for one's life and all its blessings?"

"To the extent that the United States has, I don't like the word hegemony, the United States has influence around the world, I don't think that's based on to any significant degree on the fact that countries use the dollar as their major reserve."

"The reserve currency role seems to add prestige to an area and some people in Europe have talked about the desirability of the euro becoming an international reserve currency."

"The United States as usual has a sizable deficit in the current account of its balance of payments, trade account and other current accounts, current account items."

"Today we have so much more flow of private capital that most international imbalances are financed that way, by private capital movements."

"True, trust necessarily carries with it uncertainties, but we must force ourselves to think about these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities."

"Trust is a skill learned over time so that, like a well-trained athlete, one makes the right moves, usually without much reflection."

"Trust is a skill, one that is an aspect of virtually all human practices, cultures, and relationships."

"Trust and the ability to identify trustworthiness are not the same thing, although trust and trustworthiness are logically linked."