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
Subjectivity is the truth. By virtue of the relationship subsisting between the eternal truth and the existing individual, the paradox came into being. Let us now go further, let us suppose that the eternal essential truth is itself a paradox. How does the paradox come into being? By putting the eternal essential truth into juxtaposition with existence. Hence when we posit such a conjunction with the truth itself, the truth becomes a paradox. The eternal truth has come into being in time: this is the paradox.
Character | Eternal | Existence | Individual | Paradox | Relationship | Time | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
Anthony Kenny, fully Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny
It is characteristic of our age to endeavour to replace virtues by technology. That is to say, wherever possible we strive to use methods of physical or social engineering to achieve goals which our ancestors thought attainable only by the training of character. Thus we try so far as possible to make contraception take the place of chastity, and anesthetics to take the place of fortitude; we replace resignation by insurance policies and munificence by the Welfare state. It would be idle romanticism to deny that such techniques and institutions are often less painful and more efficient methods of achieving the goods and preventing the evils which unaided virtue once sought to achieve and avoid. But it would be an equal and opposite folly to hope that the take-over of virtue by technology may one day be complete.
Age | Character | Chastity | Day | Folly | Fortitude | Goals | Hope | Munificence | Resignation | Technology | Thought | Training | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |
Catharine Macaulay Graham, born Catharine Sawbridge
The virtue of benevolence... is of so comprehensive a nature, that it contains the principle of every moral duty.
Bruno Lessing, pseudonymn for Randolph Edgar Block
We seldom speak of the virtue which we have, but much oftener of that which we lack.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
An ardent love and admiration of virtue seems to imply the existence of something opposite to it, and it seems highly probably that the same beauty of form and substance, the same perfection of character could not be generated without the impressions of disapprobation which arise from the spectacle of moral evil.
Admiration | Beauty | Character | Evil | Existence | Love | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty |
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
Belief | Character | Error | Justify | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Order | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
The most precious of all possessions, is power over ourselves; power to withstand trial, to bear suffering, to front danger; power over pleasure and pain; power to follow convictions, however resisted by menace and scorn; the power of calm reliance in scenes of darkness an storms. He that has not a mastery over his inclinations; he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry, and is in danger of never being good for anything.
Character | Convictions | Danger | Darkness | Good | Industry | Pain | Pleasure | Possessions | Power | Present | Reason | Suffering | Virtue | Virtue | Wants | Danger |
Since man is endowed with intelligence and determines his own ends, it is up to him to put himself in tune with the ends necessarily demanded by his nature. This means that there is, by very virtue of human nature, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, is nothing more than that.
Character | Ends | Human nature | Intelligence | Law | Man | Means | Nature | Nothing | Order | Reason | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say; it! virtue even has need of limits.
Abuse | Character | Experience | Man | Need | Power | Virtue | Virtue |