This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.
Ability | Action | Ideas | Men | Motives | Passion | People | Society | Thought | Society | Govern | Thought |
The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.
The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
Difficulty | Glory | Reputation |
However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.
Death | Difficulty | Inevitable | Life | Life | Present |
Since I was twenty-four there never was any vagueness in my plans or ideas as to what God's work was for me.
It will be found a work of no small difficulty to dispossess a vice from the heart, where long possession begins to plead prescription.
Difficulty | Heart | Will | Work | Vice |
The Occasion of the imagined Difficulty in conceiving disinterested Desires, has probably been from the attempting to define this simple Idea, Desire. It is called an uneasy Sensation in the absence of Good. Whereas Desire is as distinct from any Sensation, as the Will is from the Understanding or Senses. This every one must acknowledge, who speaks of desiring to remove Uneasiness or Pain.
Absence | Desire | Difficulty | Good | Pain | Understanding | Will |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
New ideas can be good or bad, just the same as old ones.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
I do not know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist. Further, I know what I mean by the terms I and Myself; and I know this immediately or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound. The Mind, Spirit, or Soul is that indivisible unextended thing which thinks, acts, and perceives.
George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
The difficulty in life is the choice.
Choice | Difficulty | Life | Life |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind. Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks; and in truth whoever shall go about to divide his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task.
Abstract | Existence | Ideas | Mind | Nothing | Soul | Spirit | Time | Truth | Will |
Life is a series of inspired follies. The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.
Chance | Day | Difficulty | Life | Life |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will... There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways... But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or my self. By which words I do not denote any of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consist in being perceived.
Existence | Ideas | Imagination | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Self | Soul | Spirit | Words |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Patriotism is often understood to mean only a readiness for exceptional sacrifices and actions. Essentially, however, it is the sentiment which, in the relationships of our daily life and under ordinary conditions, habitually recognizes that the community is one’s substantive groundwork and end. It is out of this consciousness, which during life’s daily round stands the test in all circumstances, that there subsequently also arises the readiness for extraordinary exertions. But since men would often rather be magnanimous than law-abiding, they readily persuade themselves that they possess this exceptional patriotism in order to be sparing in the expression of a genuine patriotic sentiment or to excuse their lack of it. If again this genuine patriotism is looked upon as that which may begin of itself and arise from subjective ideas and thoughts, it is being confused with opinion, because so regarded patriotism is deprived of its true ground, objective reality.
Circumstances | Consciousness | Ideas | Law | Life | Life | Men | Opinion | Order | Patriotism | Reality | Sentiment |
The greatest ideas seem meager enough when they have passed through the sieve of petty minds.
Gerald Brenan, fully Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan
Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values; that is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
Difficulty | Education | Experience | Ideas |