This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Peter Geach, fully Peter Thomas Geach
The usefulness of historical knowledge in philosophy, here as elsewhere, is that the prejudices of our own period may lose their grip on us if we imaginatively enter into another period, when people’s prejudices were different.
Character | Knowledge | People | Philosophy | Usefulness |
J. G. Fichte, fully Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge... It is intended to express that Act which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather is at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible.
Character | Consciousness | Knowledge | Wisdom |
There is a sort of knowledge beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had in conversation; so necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers the true practical system can be learned only in the world.
Books | Character | Conversation | Human nature | Knowledge | Learning | Men | Nature | Power | System | Understanding | World |
Education begins with life. Before we are aware the foundations of character are laid, and subsequent teaching avails but little to remove or alter them... If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Character | Education | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man |
We maintain... that the individual consciousness is an integral part of that which is essential and permanent in the living being, that it pre-exists and survives all successive organizations.
Character | Consciousness | Individual |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
A return from the over-estimation of the property of consciousness is the indispensable preliminary to any genuine insight into the course of psychic events... The unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious can stop at this stage, and yet claim to be considered a full psychic function.
Character | Consciousness | Estimation | Events | Indispensable | Insight | Life | Life | Property |
Joseph Fletcher, fully Joseph Francis Fletcher
Man is his own star, and that soul that can be honest, is the only perfect man.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
Simplicity is the straightforwardness of a soul which refuses itself any reaction with regard to itself or its deeds. This virtue differs from and surpasses sincerity. We see many people who are sincere without being simple. They do not wish to be taken for other than what they are; but they are always fearing lest they should be taken for what they are not.
Character | Deeds | People | Regard | Simplicity | Sincerity | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Mental activity, which works in its way from the memory-image to the production of identity of perception via the outer world, merely represents a roundabout way to wish-fulfillment made necessary by experience. Thinking is indeed nothing but a substitute for the hallucinatory wish; and if the dream is called a wish-fulfillment, this becomes something self-evident, since nothing but a wish can impel our psychic apparatus to activity.
Character | Experience | Fulfillment | Memory | Nothing | Perception | Self | Thinking | World |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our sense-organs.
Character | Consciousness | Nature | Reality | Sense | World |
Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them. It gets the name of willfulness when it will not admit of a lawful change to the better. Therefore constancy without knowledge cannot be always good. In things ill it is not virtue, but an absolute vice.
Absolute | Better | Change | Character | Constancy | Good | Knowledge | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
Simplicity is that grace which frees the soul from all unnecessary reflections upon itself.
Character | Grace | Simplicity | Soul |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
What can be the aim of withholding from children, or let us say from young people, this information about the sexual life of human beings? Is it a fear of arousing interest in such matters prematurely, before it spontaneously stirs in them? Is it a hope of retarding by concealment of this kind the development of the sexual instinct in general, until such time as it can find its way into the only channels open to it in the civilized social order? Is it supposed that children would show no interest or understanding for the facts and riddles of sexual life if they were not prompted to do so by outside influence? Is it regarded as possible that the knowledge withheld from them will not reach them in other ways? Or is it genuinely and seriously intended that later on they should consider everything connected with sex as something despicable and abhorrent from which their parents and teachers wish to keep them apart as long as possible? I am really at a loss so say which of these can be the motive for the customary concealment from children of everything connected with sex. I only know that these arguments are one and all equally foolish, and that I find it difficult to pay them the compliment of serious refutation.
Character | Children | Concealment | Fear | Hope | Influence | Instinct | Knowledge | Life | Life | Order | Parents | People | Time | Understanding | Will | Loss |
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, born Margaret Power
One of the almost numberless advantages of goodness is, that it blinds its possessor to many of those faults in others which could not fail to be detected by the morally defective. A consciousness of unworthiness renders people extremely quick-sighted in discerning the vices of their neighbors; as person scan easily discover in others the symptoms of those diseases beneath which they themselves have suffered.
Character | Consciousness | People |