This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions.
Ability | Absurd | Bitterness | Choice | Consequences | Giving | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nothing | God |
Beyond the logic concerned with things, education must provide the possibility of awakening and cultivating moral aesthetic intuitions. It is the neglect of these higher values that has reduced life to a mere struggle for existence and to the detriment of social and human values in economic and political life.
Aesthetic | Awakening | Education | Existence | Life | Life | Logic | Neglect | Struggle |
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we were innocent.
[Man’s] self-conscious existence as man forces on him a choice of uses for his faculties... This choice is what is called free will. Free will, therefore, not only a prerogative but an obligation for man. Free will thus understood, has nothing to do with destiny. It is a power which man is compelled by his own nature to use, whether the use he makes of it is predestined or not... the responsibility of deciding rests with me just the same whether the outcome is predetermined or not. If it is predetermined, it is my own past habit-forming and character-forming decisions in this and previous lifetimes which have predetermined it; and this decision in its turn will help to condition my mind, thus determining future ones.
Character | Choice | Decision | Destiny | Existence | Free will | Future | Habit | Man | Mind | Nature | Nothing | Obligation | Past | Power | Responsibility | Self | Will |
Since a choice must be made, we must see which is the least bad. You have two things to lose: truth and happiness. You have two things at stake: your reason and your happiness. And you have two things to avoid: error and misery. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. How about your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and loss in calling heads that God exists. If you win, you win everything. If you lose, you lose nothing. So do not hesitate: wager that God exists.
Choice | Error | God | Nothing | Reason | Truth | Loss | God |
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
We may neglect the wrongs which we receive, but be careful to rectify those which we are the cause of to others.
Tone of voice, look, and manner can prove no less eloquent than choice of words.
We say that pleasure is the starting-point and the end of living blissfully. For we recognize pleasure as a good which is primary and innate. We begin every act of choice and avoidance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience as the criterion of every good thing.
Choice | Experience | Good | Pleasure |
Leisure, though the propertied classes give its name to their own idleness, is not idleness. It is not even a luxury: it is a necessity, and a necessity of the first importance. Some of the most valuable work done in the world has been done at leisure, and never paid for in cash or kind. Leisure any be described as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes: labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.
Choice | Idleness | Labor | Leisure | Luxury | Men | Nature | Necessity | Work | World |