This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created.
Evils... can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the Gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the earthly nature and this mortal sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like Him is to become holy and just and wise.
Earth | God | Good | Heaven | Mortal | Nature | Necessity | Wise |
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
Ability and necessity dwell near each other.
If we must accept fate, we are not less compelled to assert liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. We are sure, though we know not how, that necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times.
Character | Duty | Fate | Individual | Liberty | Necessity | Power | Spirit | World |
Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of war.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
No poet, no artist, of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
Aesthetic | Appreciation | Art | Contrast | Criticism | Meaning | Necessity | Order | Work | Appreciation | Art | Value |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous.
Ability | Consciousness | Desire | Man | Necessity | Nothing |
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
By narcissism is meant ceasing to have an authentic interest in the outside world but instead an intense attachment to oneself, to one’s own group, clan, religion, nation, race, etc. — with consequent serious distortions of rational judgment. In general, the need for narcissistic satisfaction derives from the necessity to compensate for material and cultural poverty.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in the idea "that all men are created equal," love for mankind has not become a common experience. Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for an individual or as an abstract concept to be realized only in the future. But love for man cannot be separated from love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.
Abstract | Achievement | Individual | Love | Man | Mankind | Means | Men | Necessity | Spirit |