This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I felt that on a basis of a search for the miraculous it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying.
Peter Geach, fully Peter Thomas Geach
If a philosopher says he doubts whether there is anything objectionable in the practice of lying, he is not to be heard. Perhaps he is not sincere in what he says; perhaps his understanding is debauched by wickedness; perhaps, as often happens to philosophers, he has been deluded by a fallacious argument into denying what he really knows to be the case. Anyhow, it does not lie in his mouth to say that here I am abandoning argument for abuse; there is something logically incongruous, to use Newman's phrase, if we take the word of a Professor of Lying that he does not lie. Let me emphasize that I am not saying a sane and honest man must think one should never lie; but I say that, even if he thinks lying is sometimes a necessary evil, a sane and honest man must think it an evil.
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
In the course of ages the nucleus of social custom inscribed in law has been subjected to but slight and gradual modifications.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace
It is natural for man to relate the units of distance by which he travels to the dimensions of the globe that he inhabits. Thus, in moving about the earth, he may know by the simple denomination of distance its proportion to the whole circuit of the earth. This has the further advantage of making nautical and celestial measurements correspond. The navigator often needs to determine, one from the other, the distance he has traversed from the celestial arc lying between the zeniths at his point of departure and at his destination. It is important, therefore, that one of these magnitudes should be the expression of the other, with no difference except in the units. But to that end, the fundamental linear unit must be an aliquot part of the terrestrial meridian... Thus, the choice of the meter was reduced to that of the unity of angles.
Powhatan, proper name was Wahunsenacawh, also spelled Wahunsonacock NULL
Do you believe me such a fool as not to prefer eating good meat, sleeping quietly with my wives and children, laughing and making merry with you, having copper and hatchets and anything else—as your friend—to flying from you as your enemy, lying cold in the woods, eating acorns and roots, and being so hunted by you meanwhile, that if but a twig break, my men will cry out, "here comes Captain Smith!" Le us be friend, then. Do not invade us thus with such an armed force. Lay aside these arms.
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
It is requisite to choose the most excellent life; for custom will make it pleasant. Wealth is an infirm anchor, glory is still more infirm; and in a similar manner, the body, dominion, and honour. For all these are imbecile and powerless. What then are powerful anchors. Prudence, magnanimity, fortitude. These no tempest can shake. This is the Law of God, that virtue is the only thing that is strong; and that everything else is a trifle.
A system of ethics may be based either on fear or on love, but not on both. When based on fear, the letter of the law, as a rule, will be executed, but not its spirit. Because of fear, men may deal honestly with one another, but they will not necessarily be honest men, they may speak truthfully even and not be truthful. Fear develops a dual personality, one manifested in the presence of the object feared, the other, perhaps of extremely opposite tendencies, unfolded in the secret chamber of the heart. In a system of ethics based on fear, man is persuaded that he is weak and untrustworthy, that his nature is hopelessly corrupt, unable to master itself except at the lash of a Force lying outside himself. Man, it then would seem, is innately wicked ; his wickedness must be chained by threats of divine wrath and punishment ; he, of his own accord, would not walk in the path that is straight ; he must be forced into it by the gaps and ditches that are lurking dangerously outside this path. Such a system, in which man is convinced that he is unable to take care of himself, build his own character, merely tends to generate moral weakness and cowardice. A system of ethics based on love develops a unified personality, a oneness between thought and action. It enhances, more and more, the moral courage which is basic to man. Through love, man becomes conscious of the great force of goodness and virtue that lie within him. He knows that he is possessed of inherent goodness and godliness, if he knows that in himself is a spark of the divine, a force that makes for perfection. All he needs to do is to allow this divine spark to illuminate and permeate his whole being, and darkness and evil will disappear from his heart.
Care | Courage | Darkness | Ethics | Evil | Fear | Force | Love | Lying | Man | Men | Nature | Object | Oneness | Punishment | System | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Weakness | Wickedness | Will | Thought |
Rabbi Akiva, fully Rebbe Akiva ben Yosef NULL
He who esteems himself highly on account of his knowledge is like a corpse lying on the wayside: the traveler turns his head away in disgust, and walks quickly by.
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
Wind indeed increases fire, but custom love.
Custom |
Richard Leakey, fully Richard Erskine Frere Leakey
A fossil hunter needs sharp eyes and a keen search image, a mental template that subconsciously evaluates everything he sees in his search for telltale clues. A kind of mental radar works even if he isn't concentrating hard. A fossil mollusk expert has a mollusk search image. A fossil antelope expert has an antelope search image. ... Yet even when one has a good internal radar, the search is incredibly more difficult than it sounds. Not only are fossils often the same color as the rocks among which they are found, so they blend in with the background; they are also usually broken into odd-shaped fragments. ... In our business, we don't expect to find a whole skull lying on the surface staring up at us. The typical find is a small piece of petrified bone. The fossil hunter's search therefore has to have an infinite number of dimensions, matching every conceivable angle of every shape of fragment of every bone on the human body.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
But now that so much is different, it is not up to us to change us? Could not we try to develop ourselves a little, and slowly work our share in the love upon us by and by? It has saved us all their hardships, and it is us slipped under the distractions, such as in a child's game sometimes loading a piece of real lace, and is happy and not happy, and finally lying on broken apart and genome Carlos Menem, worse than anything. We are spoiled by easy enjoyment like all dilettanti and stand the smell of the championship. But what if we despised our successes, as if we were starting from scratch, the work of the love of learning, which was always done for us? What if we went and beginners would, now that many things have changed.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you.
I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain ... But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming ... I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake ... There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
But from the time I was in college I learned that there is nothing one could imagine which is so strange and incredible that it was not said by some philosopher; and since that time, I have recognized through my travels that all those whose views are different from our own are not necessarily, for that reason, barbarians or savages, but that many of them use their reason either as much as or even more than we do. I also considered how the same person, with the same mind, who was brought up from infancy either among the French or the Germans, becomes different from what they would have been if they had always lived among the Chinese or among the cannibals, and how, even in our clothes fashions, the very thing that we liked ten years ago, and that we may like again within the next ten years, appears extravagant and ridiculous to us today. Thus our convictions result from custom and example very much more than from any knowledge that is certain... truths will be discovered by an individual rather than a whole people.
Convictions | Custom | Example | Individual | Infancy | Knowledge | Nothing | Reason | Time | Will | Truths |
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Stars seen through the white railings filled the heavens with pure light. All the stars from Arcturus to Capella in turn above the elms as seasons passed, and the moon which waxed and waned month by month. Lying on the grass I watched them in the night. Sometimes beneath the trees in the orchard, lying on my back, when the nights were warm I gazed at the sky through the branches of trees which were silvered by the light of the stars, and the sky cut, as it were, into bright pieces by the intervening leaves.
Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
Lying |
Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.
Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.