This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
But truer stars did govern Proteus' birth; his words are bonds, his oaths are oracles, his love sincere, his thoughts immaculate, his tears pure messengers sent from his heart, his heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth. Two Gentlemen from Verona, Act ii, Scene 7
Man | Perfection |
Desire of having is the sin of covetousness. Twelfth Night, Act v, Scene 1
Art | Father | Perfection | Art |
Do not give dalliance too much the rein; the strongest oaths are straw to the fire in the blood. The Tempest, Act iv, Scene 1
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together; Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care; Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare. Youth is full of sport, age's breadth is short; Youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, and age is tame. Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee. The Passionate Pilgrim
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.
Nature | Philosophy |
It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
Consciousness | Existence | Nature |
I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.
I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
Human nature | Nature | Psychology |
Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!
Danger | Firmness | Man | Nature | Opposition | Speech | Will | Danger | Circumstance | Truths |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
The word perception is, in the language of philosophers previous to Reid, used in a very extensive signification. By Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibnitz, and others, it is employed in a sense almost as unexclusive as consciousness, in its widest signification. By Reid this word was limited to our faculty acquisitive of knowledge, and to that branch of this faculty whereby, through the senses, we obtain a knowledge of the external world. But his limitation did not stop here. In the act of external perception he distinguished two elements, to which he gave the names of perception and sensation. He ought perhaps to have called these perception proper and sensation proper, when employed in his special meaning.
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off . . . .
Absolute | Day | Human nature | Nature | Present | Question | War |
We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
Human nature | Nature |
There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.