This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Joseph Stalin, fully Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, born Loseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili
He who wishes to lead a movement must conduct a fight on two fronts – against those who lag behind and those who rush ahead.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
Better | Competition | Conduct | Fighting | Good | Ideas | Men | Power | Thought | Time | Truth | Wishes | Thought |
The greatest and highest truths have no outward image of themselves visible to man, which he who wishes to satisfy the soul of the inquirer can adapt to the eye of sense, and therefore we ought to train ourselves to give and accept a rational account of them; for immaterial things, which are the noblest and greatest, are shown only in thought and idea, and in no other way.
Americans are like a rich parent who wishes he knew how to give his child the hardships that made him rich.
Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
The wise man is free, since one who does as he wishes is free. Because he does what he wishes, the free man is wise. One who acts with wisdom has nothing to fear, for fear lives in sin. Where there is no fear there is liberty; where there is liberty there is power of doing what one wishes. Therefore, only the wise man is free.
Fear | Liberty | Man | Nothing | Power | Sin | Wisdom | Wise | Wishes |
The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In the development of both capitalism and communism, as we visualize them in the next fifty or a hundred years, the processes that encourage human alienation will continue. Both systems are developing into managerial societies, their inhabitants well fed, well clad, having their wishes satisfied, and not having wishes that cannot be satisfied. Men are increasingly automatons, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines; there reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it.
Alienation | Capitalism | Intelligence | Machines | Man | Men | Power | Reason | Will | Wisdom | Wishes |
There is one wish ruling over all mankind, and it is a wish which is never in any single instance granted - each man wishes to be his own master. It is a boy's beautific vision, and it remains the grown-up man's ruling passion to the last. But the fact is, life is a service; the only question is, whom will we serve?
Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.
Wishes |
Destiny has two ways of crushing us - by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
Wishes |
Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL
Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.
Beginning | Change | Knowledge | Truth | Wishes | World | Learn |
That capacity to understand life comes into being only when one understands relationship. Relationship is a mirror. It must reflect, not as one wishes oneself to be, ideally or romantically, but what one actually is, and it is very difficult to perceive oneself as one actually is because one is so accustomed to escaping from what is; it is arduous to perceive, to observe silently what is, because one is so used to condemning, justifying, comparing, identifying. And in that process of justification, condemnation, that which is, is not understood. Only in the understanding of what is is there freedom from what is.
Capacity | Freedom | Life | Life | Relationship | Understanding | Wishes | Understand |
Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are... The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves, it is our very self. Man is manacled only by himself: thought and action are the jailers of Fate - they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom - they liberate, being noble. Not what a man wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns.
Action | Angels | Fate | Freedom | Man | Thought | Wishes | Fate | Thought |