This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith
"Excellence," besought Kai Lung, not without misgivings, "how many warriors, each having some actual existence, are there in your never-failing band?" "For all purposes save those of attack and defence there are fifteen score of the best and bravest, as their pay-sheets well attest," was the confident response. "In a strictly literal sense, however, there are no more than can be seen on a mist-enshrouded day with a resolutely closed eye."
Awareness | Body | Death | Dreams | Fate | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Order | Will | World | Fate | Awareness |
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the others, disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.
Experience | Love | Man | Nature | Order | Understand |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I heard them laugh. I turned off the light and tried to go to sleep. It was not necessary to read any more. I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But i could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't! I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.
Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nineÂteenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primiÂtive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reliÂgions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Control | Death | Fighting | Good | Health | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Means | Necessity | Need | Play | Question | Reality | Right | Science | Security | Self-deception | Time | Will | World |
No mistake about it: the curriculum in the "school" of anxiety is the unlearning of repression, of everything that the child taught himÂself to deny so that he could move about with a minimal animal equanimity. Kierkegaard is thus placed directly in the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition. Education for man means facing up to his natural impotence and death.42 As Luther urged us: "I say die, i.e., taste death as though it were present." It is only if you "taste" death with the lips of your living body that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die.
Nature |
The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.
Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
I feel on my face all the pain slap went Elymazlom in the this world, wherever he found injustice, the same is the national.
Fighting | Revolution | Will |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The bigger the country, the greater is the need for internal "structure" and for a decentralized approach to development. If this need is neglected, there is no hope for the poor.
Battle | Experience | Force | Man | Nature |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
Democritus introduces the intellect having an argument with the senses about what is 'real'.
Hypothesis | Indispensable | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Nothing | Position | Question | Science | Will |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
I do not agree with what you say, but I'll stand to the death defending your right to say what you want.
Fighting | Individual | Method | Objectives | Will |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
There are always some things which we do for their own sakes, and there are other things which we do for some other purpose. One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-to-ends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and argument about this.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of live is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change. It is not a question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on. If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would regain the dignity of manÂ…
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Since there is now increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, particularly in living nature, the entire outlook and methodology of economics is being called into question. The study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insights, unless complemented and completed by a study of meta-economics.
Cooperation | Nature | Public | Will | Work |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
All the common phenomena of Morphology and Physiology, of Chorology and Œkology, of Ontology and Paleontology, can be explained by the theory of descent, and referred to simple mechanical causes. It is precisely in this, viz., that the primary simple causes of all these complex aggregates of phenomena are common to them all, and that other mechanical causes for them are unthinkable—it is in this that, to us, the guarantee of their certainty consists.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanization. If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over.
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.
Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if produces more wisdom.
Nature |