This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
R. W. Sellars, fully Roy Wood Sellars
The Humanist’s religion, is the religion of one who says yea to the life here and now, of one who is self-reliant, fearless, intelligent and creative... Its Goal is the mastery of things that they may become servants and instrumentalities to man’s spiritual comradeship.
The acceptance of our nature - which does not mean compliant acquiescence in faults that we can remedy - is essential for living a meaningful life, and therefore one that is significant as well.
Acceptance | Life | Life | Nature |
The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrine in all seriousness as true sensu proprio, and as these doctrines, you have the great mischief of a continual fraud.
Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants - both know too much of him.
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
To have faults and not reform them - that may indeed be called having faults.
Reform |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
The real fault is to have faults and not to amend them.
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
To acknowledge our faults when we are blamed, is modesty; to discover them to one's friends, in ingenuousness, is confidence; but to proclaim them to the world, if one does not take care, is pride.
Care | Confidence | Modesty | Pride | World |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
Men's faults are characteristic. It is by observing a man's faults that one may come to know his virtues.
We easily forget our faults when they are known only to us.
If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others.
Pleasure |
Terrible consequences there will always be when the mean vices attempt to mimic the grand passions. Great men will never do great mischief but for some great end.
Consequences | Men | Will |
We have few faults that are not more excusable in themselves than are the means which we use to conceal them.
Means |
Idleness is the badge of the gentry, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the stepmother of discipline, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active, and, if it is not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.
Body | Business | Cause | Devil | Discipline | Idleness | Melancholy | Mind |
We acknowledge our faults in order to repair by our sincerity the damage they have done us in the eyes of others.