This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The Occasion of the imagined Difficulty in conceiving disinterested Desires, has probably been from the attempting to define this simple Idea, Desire. It is called an uneasy Sensation in the absence of Good. Whereas Desire is as distinct from any Sensation, as the Will is from the Understanding or Senses. This every one must acknowledge, who speaks of desiring to remove Uneasiness or Pain.
Absence | Desire | Difficulty | Good | Pain | Understanding | Will |
The commandment of knowledge is yet higher than the commandment over the will: for it is a commandment over the reason, belief, and understanding of man, which is the highest part of the mind, and giveth law to the will itself. For there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne or chair of estate in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning.
Belief | Earth | Knowledge | Law | Learning | Man | Men | Mind | Power | Reason | Understanding | Will |
The knowledge of man is as the waters, some descending from above, and some springing from beneath; the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired by divine revelation.
Knowledge | Light | Man | Nature | Revelation |
Friendship consists of a willing ear, an understanding heart and a helping hand.
Heart | Understanding |
Eugenio Maria de Hostos (y Bonilla)
Lend your light to the blind. Why should the wickedness of men irritate you, when it is only blindness?
Light | Men | Wickedness |
The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.
Axioms | Nature | Sense | Understanding |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the reunification of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent persona and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type.
Consciousness | Contradiction | Isolation | Knowing | Law | Life | Life | Love | Means | Nothing | Self | Understanding | Unity |
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
Perception is a mirror, not a fact... The ego does everything it can to prevent us from understanding that our thoughts, not the outside world, cause what we see and experience, and that the world we experience is the effect of our own thoughts.
Cause | Ego | Experience | Perception | Understanding | World |
For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.
Power | Understanding |
The grave itself is but a covered bridge, leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!
Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.
How hard it is to confess that we have spoken without thinking, that we have talked nonsense. How many a man says a thing in haste and heat, without fully understanding or half meaning it, and then, because he has said it, holds fast to it, and tries to defend it as if it were true! But how much wiser, how much more admirable and attractive it is when a man has the grace to perceive and acknowledge his mistakes! It gives us assurance that he is capable of learning, of growing, of improving, so that his future will be better than his past.
Better | Future | Grace | Haste | Learning | Man | Meaning | Nonsense | Past | Thinking | Understanding | Will |
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.
Knowledge | Nothing | Object | Sensibility | Thought | Understanding | Think |
Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
Control | Ends | Nature | Understanding |
At the moment that you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don’t understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.
Awe | Life | Life | Time | Understanding |