This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simón Bolívar, fully Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco
America is ungovernable; those who served the revolution have plowed the sea.
Character | Government | Principles | Virtue | Virtue | Government |
Respectable scientists like de Broglie himself accept wave mechanics because it confers coherence and unity upon the experimental findings of contemporary science, and in spite of the astonishing changes it implies in connection with ideas of causality, time, and space, but it is because of these changes that it wins favor with the public. The great popular success of Einstein was the same thing. The public drinks in and swallows eagerly everything that tends to dispossess the intelligence in favor of some technique; it can hardly wait to abdicate from intelligence and reason and from everything that makes man responsible for his destiny.
Silius Italicus, fully Tiberius Catius Asconius Silius Italicus
Away with delay; the chance of great fortune is short-lived.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The conceptions I have summarized here I first put forward only tentatively, but in the course of time they have won such a hold over me that I can no longer think in any other way.
Attention | Better | Cause | Change | Civilization | Ethics | Example | Love | Nothing | Possessions | Precept | Religion | Unhappiness | Virtue | Virtue | Obstacle | Think |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
Absolute | Anarchy | Ethics | Existence | Freedom | Heart | Individual | Law | Man | Means | Merit | Oppression | Power | Relationship | Sense | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Value |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends [grasps] anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.
Attainment | Evil | Nothing | Refinement | Risk | Rule | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Learn |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
Let us then take care not to despise these things. How absurd it would be to grasp at money and throw away health; and to be lavish of the cleansing of the body, but economical over the cleansing of the soul; and to seek for freedom from earthly slavery, but not to care about heavenly freedom; and to make every effort to be splendidly housed and dressed, but to have never a thought how you yourself may become really very precious; and to be zealous to do good to others, without any desire to do good to yourself. And if good could be bought, you would spare no money; but if mercy is freely at your feet, you despise it for its cheapness. Every time is suitable for your ablution, since any time may be your death. With Paul I shout to you with that loud voice, ‘Behold now is the accepted time; behold Now is the day of salvation.
Adversity | Attention | Esteem | Nothing | Prosperity | Sin | Virtue | Virtue |
Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL
I had wondered for a long time why God had preferences and why all souls did not receive an equal amount of grace... He set the book of nature before me and I saw that all the flowers He has created are lovely. The splendor of the rose and whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. I realised that if every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness and there would be no wild flowers to make the meadows gay.
Desire | Fault | Good | Love | Mind | Reason | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Fault |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
But if anyone who thinks we have spoken rightly on this subject reproaches us with holding communion with heretics, let him prove that we are open to this charge, and we will either convince him or retire. But it is not safe to make any innovation before judgment is given, especially in a matter of such importance, and connected with so great issues. We have protested and continue to protest this before God and men. And not even now, be well assured, should we have written this, if we had not seen that the Church was being tom asunder and divided, among their other tricks, by their present synagogue of vanity. But if anyone when we say and protest this, either from some advantage they will thus gain, or through fear of men, or monstrous littleness of mind, or through some neglect of pastors and governors, or through love of novelty and proneness to innovations, rejects us as unworthy of credit, and attaches himself to such men, and divides the noble body of the Church, he shall bear his judgment, whoever he may be, and shall give account to God in the day of judgment. But if their long books, and their new Psalters, contrary to that of David, and the grace of their metres, are taken for a third Testament, we too will compose Psalms, and will write much in metre. For we also think we have the spirit of God, if indeed this is a gift of the Spirit, and not a human novelty. This I will that thou declare publicly, that we may not be held responsible, as overlooking such an evil, and as though this wicked doctrine received food and strength from our indifference.
Preference | Rank | Virtue | Virtue |
An angel fell from Heaven without any other passion except pride, and so we may ask whether it is possible to ascend to Heaven by humility alone, without any other of the virtues.
Action | Fear | Future | Glory | Good | Knowledge | Light | Lord | Love | Order | Perfection | Present | Strength | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Blessed |
Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to ‘descent from an animal world’; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind. In this wise and crucial sense, the Darwinian revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush — a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
Enthusiasm | Man | Religion | Virtue | Virtue |
Also, keep in mind that even suffering can have its good points. Sometimes, when things are going along relatively smoothly for you, you can more easily ignore the difficulties of others. But, when you yourself encounter these same difficulties, you’re more likely to open your heart and experience empathy. As your heart opens, your loving-compassion also grows stronger. If you can use your difficulties to help generate genuine and deeply felt compassion for others — one of the most beautiful and liberating of all spiritual qualities — then your suffering was definitely worthwhile.
Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey
Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you.