This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Religion is moral life rising to think, i.e. becoming aware of the free universality of its concrete essence… the consciousness of “absolute” truth.
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
Consciousness | Life | Life | Love | Religion |
The mystic can live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heartbeats and those of the universe.
Consciousness | Happy | Universe |
There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.
Consciousness | Life | Life | Love | Nothing |
Hermann Keyserling, fully Hermann Alexander Graf Keyserling
God is experienced as “Thou” or “I,” according to the spot in which consciousness centers; but the man who experiences Him as “I” experiences Him more profoundly.
Consciousness | God | Man |
Against the formidable array of cumulative evidence for Determinism, there is but one argument of real force: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action.
Action | Argument | Consciousness | Evidence | Force |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.
Consciousness | God | Man | Unconsciousness |
At the end of life, when someone has lived a life with consciousness and they look back on it, the questions are simple: "Did I live fully?" and, more than anything else, "Did I love well?"
Consciousness | Life | Life | Love |
The severest punishment suffered by a sensitive mind, for injury inflicted upon another, is the consciousness of having done it.
Consciousness | Mind | Punishment |
The consciousness of my existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me.
Consciousness | Existence | Time |
Freedom and the consciousness of it as a faculty of following the moral law with unyielding resolution is independence of inclinations, at least as motives determining (though not as affecting) our desire, and so far as I am conscious of this freedom in following my moral maxims, it is the only source of an unaltered contentment which is necessarily connected with it and rests on no special feeling.
Consciousness | Contentment | Desire | Freedom | Law | Maxims | Moral law | Motives | Resolution | Following |
Both inner and outer hearing, which cannot be separated, change consciousness to a greater extent than anything else in our eye-orientated age.
Age | Change | Consciousness |
Our life is at all times and before all else the consciousness of what we can do.
Consciousness | Life | Life |
The consciousness of being loved softens the keenest pangs, even at the moment of parting; yea, even the eternal farewell is robbed of half its bitterness when uttered in accepts that breathe love to the last sigh.
Bitterness | Consciousness | Eternal | Love |
Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
Consciousness | Freedom | Necessity |
In the social production of their existence, human beings necessarily enter into determinate relations, independent of their will, relations of production, corresponding to a given stage of development of their material productive powers. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and tow which correspond determinate forms of social consciousness. the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and spiritual life. It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive powers of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same things in terms of right - with the property relations in the framework of which they have thus far operated. From forms of development of the productive powers these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
Consciousness | Era | Existence | Life | Life | Property | Revolution | Right | Society | Will | Society |
The goal of the myth is to… [affect] a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will.
Consciousness | Individual | Myth | Reconciliation | Will |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
The consciousness of having done a splendid action is itself a sufficient reward.
Action | Consciousness | Reward |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Every generous action loves the public view; yet no theatre for virtue is equal to a consciousness of it.
Action | Consciousness | Public | Virtue | Virtue |