This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always toward ourselves.
Reality | Zen | Understand |
Poor is the man who does not know his own intrinsic worth and tends to measure everything by relative value. A man of financial wealth who values himself by his financial net worth is poorer than a poor man who values himself by his intrinsic self-worth.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
Consciousness | Nature | Reality | Sense | World |
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct... and to refrain from destruction.
Attention | Body | Circumstances | Destroy | Life | Life | Love | Man | Men | Nature | Necessity | Obligation | Power | Present | Public | Reality | Rule | Soul | Thought | Time | Will | World | Thought |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
Reality |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Conduct | Existence | Indispensable | Individual | Justification | Life | Life | Means | Reality | Work | Value |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
Reality |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. Whereas, on the other hand, the law of all activities governing social life, except in the case of primitive communities, is that here one sacrifices human life — in himself and in others — to things which are only means to a better way of living. This sacrifice takes on various forms, but it all comes back to the question of power. Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men — oppressed and oppressors alike — the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels. [p.141]
Absolute | Attention | Belief | Disbelief | Good | Heart | Longing | Love | Man | Reality | Respect | Sacred | World | Respect |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
We are certainly getting ahead if I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar.
Achievement | Better | Cause | Civilization | Death | Duty | Existence | Illusion | Life | Life | Little | Man | Question | Reality | Truth | War | Will |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.
Consciousness | Nature | Reality | World | Value |
The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.
It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world—and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish—she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.
Desire | Men | Reality | Respect | Thought | Respect | Thought |
There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of hought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like to the extent that is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.
Absolute | Absurd | Attention | Good | Longing | Love | Man | Object | Power | Reality | Space | Thought | Unique | World | Thought |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.
Reality |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
There is an honesty which is but decided selfishness in disguise. The man who will not refrain from expressing his sentiments and manifesting his feelings, however unfit the time, however inappropriate the place, however painful this expression may be, lays claim, forsooth, to our approbation as an honest man, and sneers at those of finer sensibilities as hypocrites.
Circumstances | Habit | People | Reality |