This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
An important way to distinguish philosophy from religion is that philosophy, at its best, raises questions, whereas religion provides answers. Answers can sometimes lose their force, however, if the questions to which they provide answers have somehow been lost, muted, or superseded. But philosophy can never end. As long as we live, we are going to ask ourselves about the meaning of life. Some have written about the “end of philosophy.” It has been thought that philosophy exists only if you can construe life as a journey traveling to a new and different dimension. Some have said that the cognitive sciences, linguistics, neuroscience, and so forth will advance so much that traditional technical problems of philosophy will diminish. Insofar as philosophy is a pursuit of the art of living providing (often conflicting) guidance for living, there is a future for philosophy.
Art | Distinguish | Force | Future | Guidance | Important | Journey | Life | Life | Meaning | Philosophy | Problems | Religion | Thought | Will | Guidance | Art | Thought |
W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester
Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
Desire | Earth | Life | Life | Materialism |
We find it easy to ignore the inner voice of the soul in our pursuit of external happiness… because we are driven by our own materialistic passions and by our addictive need for quick, painless fixes for anything disturbing in our lives.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Whatever complaints the neurotic patient may have, whatever symptoms he may present are rooted in his inability to love, if we mean by love a capacity for the experience of concern, responsibility, respect, and understanding of another person and the intense desire for that other person’s growth.
Capacity | Desire | Experience | Growth | Love | Present | Respect | Responsibility | Understanding |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
One instance of the innate and ineradicable inequality of men is their tendency to fall into two classes of leaders and followers. The latter constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authority which will make decisions for them and to which they for the most part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests that more care should be taken than hitherto to educate an upper stratum of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth, whose business it would be to give direction to the dependent masses.
Authority | Business | Care | Inequality | Intimidation | Majority | Men | Need | Submission | Truth | Will | Business |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
All genuine ideals have one thing in common: they express the desire for something which is not yet accomplished but which is desirable for the purposes of the growth and happiness of the individual.
Desire | Growth | Ideals | Individual | Happiness |
In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal… To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the “others,” of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion.
Consciousness | Existence | Humanity | Money | People | Power |
Our society has progressed largely because of our creativity and inquisitiveness – and because we’re competitive. We’re driven by the desire to develop products and services which are more ingenious than what others have put forth. Competition is inherently good, but when it is tainted with excess greed or negative motives, there can be harmful results. How we compete is very important to our Souls.
Competition | Creativity | Desire | Excess | Good | Greed | Important | Inquisitiveness | Motives | Society | Society |
The most effective kind of prayer is that in which we place ourselves, in our hearts, before God, relinquishing all resistance, letting go of all secret irritation, opening ourselvse to the truth, to God’s holy mystery, saying over and over again, “I desire truth, I am ready to receive it, even this truth which causes me such concern, if it be the truth. Give me the light to know it – and to see how it bears on me.”
Joyce Grenfell, fully Joyce Irene Grenfell née Phipps
There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.
Our pursuit of knowledge involves exploring the consequences of our initial assumptions, both our conceptual assumptions and empirical ones
Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.
Abstract | Awareness | Capacity | Desire | Faith | Force | Ideas | Intuition | Knowledge | Lying | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Reality | Reason | Self | Will | Wonder | Awareness |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
The future must have as its basis the consciousness of sanctity in existence – in common things, in the events of human life, in the gradually comprehended interlocking whole revealed to the human desire for knowledge, n the benedictions of beauty and love, in the catharsis, the sacred purging, of the moral drama in which character is pitted against fate and even deepest tragedy may uplift the mind.
Beauty | Character | Consciousness | Desire | Events | Existence | Fate | Future | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Sacred | Tragedy | Fate | Beauty |
The truly religious man is always more concerned about what God will do in him that what He will do to him; in this intense desire for purification of his motives he almost wishes that heaven and hell were blotted out, that he might serve God for Himself alone.
Desire | God | Heaven | Hell | Man | Motives | Will | Wishes | God |
Kenneth Kaunda, fully Kenneth David Kaunda
Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies) – just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden for the rest.
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
To be constantly without desire is the way to have a vision of the mystery of heaven and earth, for constantly to have desire is the means by which their limitations are seen.