This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Errors and exaggerations do not matter. What matters is boldness in thinking with a; strong-pitched voice, in speaking out about things as one feels them in the moment of speaking; in having the temerity to proclaim what one believes to be true without fear of the consequences. If one were to await the possession of the absolute truth, one must be either a fool or a mute. If the creative impulse were muted, the world would then be stayed on its march.
Absolute | Boldness | Consequences | Fear | Impulse | Thinking | Truth | World |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Thinking for oneself is always arduous and is sometimes painful. The temptation to stop thinking and to take dogma on faith is strong. Yet, since the intellect does possess the capacity to think for itself, it also has the impulse and feels the obligation. We may therefore feel sure that the intellect will always refuse, sooner or later, to take traditional doctrines on trust.
Capacity | Dogma | Faith | Impulse | Obligation | Temptation | Thinking | Trust | Will | Intellect | Temptation | Think |
All love, however ethereally it may bear itself, is rooted in the sexual impulse alone, nay, it absolutely is only a more definitely determined, specialised, and indeed in the strictest sense individualized sexual impulse.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Suffering is the essence of life, because it is the inevitable product of an unresolved tension between a living creature’s essential impulse to try to make itself into the centre of the Universe and its essential dependence on the rest of Creation and on the Absolute Reality.
Absolute | Dependence | Impulse | Inevitable | Life | Life | Reality | Rest | Suffering | Universe |
Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL
No deed is perfect without the impulse of the soul.
The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
Imitation | Impulse | Inferiority | Model | Resentment | Sense |
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from the lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
The impulse to escape an untenable situation often prompts human beings not to shrink back but to plunge ahead.
Impulse |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world begins with its general aim, the realization of the idea of spirit, only in an implicit form, that is, as nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of history (as already observed) is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one... This vast congeries of volitions, interest and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it.
Consciousness | History | Impulse | Instinct | Means | Nature | Object | Spirit | World |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) - this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science; and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world... It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality.
Absolute | Education | History | Impulse | Meaning | Mind | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Science | Spirit | Unity | World |
That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but is use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to dance is not rendered ironical because the danced cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so. what is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.
Cause | Death | Enough | Illusion | Impulse | Life | Life | Nature | Object | People | Pleasure | Sound | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse of obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind do of colors.
With the sharpest self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice; yet we cannot from this infer with certainty; that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will. We like them to flatter ourselves by falsely taking credit for a more noble motive; whereas in fact we can never, even with the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.
Action | Appearance | Cause | Credit | Duty | Enough | Impulse | Love | Nothing | Sacrifice | Self | Self-love | Will |
Every beauty and greatness in this world is created by a single thought or emotion inside a man. Every thing we see today, made by past generations, was, before its appearance, a thought in the mind of a man or an impulse in the heart of a woman.
Appearance | Beauty | Greatness | Heart | Impulse | Man | Mind | Past | Thought | Woman | World | Beauty | Thought |
The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.
Religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself.
Human race | Important | Impulse | Race | Religion |
Through some strange and powerful principle of "mental chemistry" which has never divulged, Nature wraps up in the impulse of strong desire, "that something" which recognizes no such word as "impossible," and accepts no such reality as failure.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The urge to do and be that which is the noblest, the most beautiful of which we are capable, is the creative impulse of every high achievement. We strive for perfection here because we long to be restored to our oneness with God.
Achievement | God | Impulse | Oneness | Perfection |
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.
Character | Contradiction | Good | Impulse | Individual | Mankind | Obedience | Time |