This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
In the end physics will replace ethics just as metaphysics displaced theology. The modern statistical view of ethics contributes towards that.
Character | Ethics | Metaphysics | Theology | Will |
One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.
Character | Metaphysics | Temptation | Temptation |
This divination of the spiritual in the things of sense, and which expresses itself I the things of sense, is precisely what we call Poetry. Metaphysics too pursues a spiritual prey, but in a very different formal object. Whereas metaphysics stands in the line of knowledge and of the contemplation of truth, poetry stands in the line of making and of the delight procured by beauty. The difference is an all-important one, and one that it would be harmful to disregard. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence... Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order. Metaphysics isolates mystery in order to know it; poetry, thanks to the balances it constructs, handles and utilizes mystery as an unknown force.
Abstract | Beauty | Contemplation | Existence | Force | Important | Intelligence | Knowledge | Metaphysics | Mystery | Object | Order | Poetry | Reflection | Sense | Truth | Wisdom | Contemplation |
The test of real and vigorous thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming dreams, is successful application to practice. Where that purpose does not exist, to give definiteness, precision, and an intelligible meaning to thought, it generates nothing better than the mystical metaphysics of the Pythagoreans or the Vedas.
Better | Dreams | Meaning | Metaphysics | Mystical | Nothing | Practice | Precision | Purpose | Purpose | Thinking | Thought | Truths |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The metaphysician looks at truth from within to without. That is why they clash. But realized souls who understand science as well as metaphysics find no difference at all. They see the parallelism between science and truth because they see the whole picture.
Looks | Metaphysics | Science | Truth | Understand |
R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
In the later nineteenth century the idea of progress became almost an article of faith. This conception was a piece of sheer metaphysics derived from evolutionary naturalism and foisted upon history by the temper of the age.
William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
The unrest which keeps the never-stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
Existence | Metaphysics | Non-existence | Thought | World | Thought |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
Force | Metaphysics | Wishes |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.
Experiment | Meaning | Metaphysics | Observation | Oneness |
George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner
There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.
Aesthetics | History | Man | Metaphysics |
George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner
There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world
Aesthetics | History | Man | Metaphysics |
Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.
Choice | Metaphysics | Power | Thought | Thought |
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
Idealism and metaphysics are the easiest things in the world, because people can talk as much nonsense as they like without basing it on objective reality or having it tested against reality. Materialism and dialectics, on the other hand, need effort. They must be based on and tested by objective reality. Unless one makes the effort one is liable to slip into idealism and metaphysics.
Effort | Idealism | Materialism | Metaphysics | Need | Nonsense | People | Reality |
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
Death | Growth | Ideas | Life | Life | Man | Metaphysics | Reconciliation | Sense | System | Virtue | Virtue |
Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well them think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.
Absurd | Ideas | Metaphysics | Think |
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.
Language | Little | Love | Metaphysics | People | Problems |
Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
It is undeniable that when a mind enlightened and enriched with modern scientific knowledge weighs this problem calmly, it feels drawn to break through the circle of completely independent or autochthonous matter, whether uncreated or self-created, and to ascend to a creating Spirit. With the same clear and critical look with which it examines and passes judgment on facts, it perceives and recognizes the work of creative omnipotence, whose power, set in motion by the mighty "Fiat" pronounced billions of years ago by the Creating Spirit, spread out over the universe, calling into existence with a gesture of generous love matter bursting with energy. In fact, it would seem that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial "Fiat lux" uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies. It is quite true that the facts established up to the present time are not an absolute proof of creation in time, as are the proofs drawn from metaphysics and Revelation in what concerns simple creation or those founded on Revelation if there be question of creation in time. The pertinent facts of the natural sciences, to which We have referred, are awaiting still further research and confirmation, and the theories founded on them are in need of further development and proof before they can provide a sure foundation for arguments which, of themselves, are outside the proper sphere of the natural sciences. This notwithstanding, it is worthy of note that modern scholars in these fields regard the idea of the creation of the universe as entirely compatible with their scientific conceptions and that they are even led spontaneously to this conclusion by their scientific research. Just a few decades ago, any such "hypothesis" was rejected as entirely irreconcilable with the present state of science. As late as 1911, the celebrated physicist Svante Arhenius declared that "the opinion that something can come from nothing is at variance with the present-day state of science, according to which matter is immutable." In this same vein we find the statement of Plato: "Matter exists. Nothing can come from nothing, hence matter is eternal. We cannot admit the creation of matter."
Absolute | Existence | Judgment | Knowledge | Light | Love | Metaphysics | Mind | Need | Nothing | Opinion | Present | Question | Regard | Research | Revelation | Theories | Time | Universe | Witness | Work |
The principal act of courage is to endure and withstand dangers doggedly rather than to attack them.
Good | Metaphysics | Truth |