This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for, (including) the want of sufficient restraint upon their passions.
The mind wants to believe that changing our circumstances will bring us peace. The mind thinks we’ve got to do something. But the reality is that we can relax in the circumstances as they are now, knowing that deep patience will bring deep peace and healing.
Circumstances | Knowing | Mind | Patience | Peace | Reality | Wants | Will |
The open mind never acts - when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still, when we can reason and investigate no more, must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our own conclusion. The man who wants to make an entirely reasonable will dies intestate.
My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worse. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it.
Character | Heart | Man | Mind | Nothing | Retirement | Solitude | Tenderness | Wants |
Refinement is the lifting of one's self upwards from the merely sensual, the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life.
Wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much but wants more.
Anti-Semitism, in a word, is fear of man's fate. The anti-Semite is the man who wants to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, devastating lightning: in short, anything but a man.
Anti-semitism | Fate | Fear | Man | Wants |
In the creative process, we are called to co-create with the thing that wants birthing. We must listen, open ourselves, summon courage, commit ourselves to the task, and begin. And this is the hardest part: in the face of nothing, we must begin. Not waiting for the sentence to be fully formed before writing the first word. Not waiting for the completed image to manifest in our minds before approaching the canvas.
The eye can only compare and estimate; the ear measures... Both the ear and the eye can evaluate, supplying us with intellectual, psychological, and emotional information of qualitative relevance. But only the ear can measure, thereby mediating quantitative and numerically precise information. If the eye wants to operate quantitatively it can at most estimate, but - as we all know - it is only able to provide approximations, and very often miscalculates. That is why the term 'optical illusion' exists in our language.
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
An economic system is not only an institutional device for satisfying existing wants and needs but a way of fashioning wants in the future.
The true happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions; it loves shade and solitude, and naturally haunts groves and fountains, fields and meadows; in short, it feels everything it wants within itself, and receives no addition from multitudes of witnesses and spectators. On the contrary, false happiness loves to be in a crowd, and to draw the eyes of the world upon her. She does not receive satisfaction from the applauses which she gives herself, but from the admiration which she raises in others. She flourishes in courts and palaces, theaters and assemblies, and has no existence but when she is looked upon.
Admiration | Conversation | Enemy | Enjoyment | Existence | Nature | Noise | Receive | Self | Solitude | Wants | World | Friendship | Happiness |