This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Half a fact is a whole falsehood. He who gives the truth a false coloring by his false manner of telling it, is the worst of liars.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The fundamental experience which objective experience itself presumes is the fundamental experience of the Other... Moral consciousness is not an experience of values, but access to exterior Being: exterior being par excellence is the Other.
Character | Consciousness | Excellence | Experience | Excellence |
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
But it is not enough to possess a truth; it is essential that the truth should possess us.
Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation.
Character | Enthusiasm | Mankind | Nature | Truth |
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Character | Experience | Good | Judgment | Wisdom |
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
Character | Love | Perfection | Truth | World |
Our concepts of the empirical world are fundamentally controlled by the character of our perceptual experience and by the introspective access we enjoy to our own minds. Thus our concepts of consciousness are constrained by the specific form of our own consciousness, so that we cannot form concepts for quite alien forms of consciousness possessed by other actual and possible creatures. Similarly, our concepts of the body, including the brain, are constrained by the way we perceive these physical objects; we have, in particular, to conceive of them as spatial entities essentially similar to other physical objects in space... But now these two forms of conceptual closure operate to prevent us from arriving at concepts for the property or relation that intelligibly links consciousness to the brain. For, first, we cannot grasp other forms of consciousness, and so we cannot grasp the theory that explains these other forms: that theory must be general, but we must always be parochial in our conception of consciousness. It is as if we were trying for a general theory of light but only could grasp the visible part of the spectrum. And, second, it is precisely the perceptually controlled conception of the brain that we have which is so hopeless in making consciousness an intelligible result of brain activity. No property we can ascribe to the brain on the basis of how it strikes us perceptually, however inferential the ascription, can be the crucible from which subjective consciousness emerges fully formed. That is why the feeling is so strong in us that there has to be something magical about the mind-brain relation.
Body | Character | Consciousness | Experience | Light | Mind | Property | Space | Wisdom | World |
We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us.
Proverbs are the condensed wisdom of long experience in brief, epigrammatic form, easily remembered and always ready for use. They are the alphabet of morals; and are commonly prudential watchwords and warnings, and so lean toward a selfish view of life.
If we crave for the goal that is worthy and fitting for man, namely, happiness of life - and this is accomplished by philosophy alone and by nothing else, and philosophy, as I said, means for us desire for wisdom, and wisdom the science of truth in things, and of things some are properly so called, others merely share the name - it is reasonable and most necessary to distinguish and systematize the accidental qualities of things.
Character | Desire | Distinguish | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nothing | Philosophy | Qualities | Science | Truth | Wisdom | Happiness |
Man gains freedom only through the use of his highest faculties. Materialism makes him more and more a slave to the forces of the phenomenal world... Our present-day materialism points in this direction - that is, in the direction of the enslavement of man by mechanisation and by its direct results, by state organisations, uniformity, the sacrifice of independent intelligence, the sweeping away of individual differences, local customs, local diversity, and all the infinite branchings of humanity that enrich life... Man is made free by ‘truth’. The truth spoken here is equated with mind. This kind of truth begins with self-knowledge.
Character | Day | Diversity | Freedom | Humanity | Individual | Intelligence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Present | Sacrifice | Self | Self-knowledge | Truth | Uniformity | World |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.