This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All the irascible passions imply movement towards something... And if we wish to know the order of all the passions in the way of generation, love and hatred are first; desire and aversion, second; hope and despair, third; fear and daring, fourth; anger, fifth; sixth and last, joy and sadness, which follow from all the passions... yet so that love precedes hatred; desire precedes aversion; hope precedes despair; fear precedes daring; and joy precedes sadness.
Anger | Daring | Desire | Despair | Fear | Hope | Joy | Love | Order | Sadness |
The acceptance of the risk of death and the acceptance of death are very different... The acceptance of the risk of death is the acceptance of life; and love of danger is love of life... The acceptance of risk is a gift you make yourself.
Acceptance | Danger | Death | Life | Life | Love | Risk | Danger |
Since things that are found in the soul are of three kinds - passions, faculties, states of character, virtue must be one of these. By passions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation, pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure or pain; by faculties the things in virtue of which we are said to be capable of feeling these, for example, of becoming angry or being pained or feeling pity; by states of character the things in virtue of which we stand well or badly with reference to the passions, for example, with reference to anger we stand badly if we feel it violently or too weakly, and well if we feel it moderately; and similarly with reference to the other passions. Now neither the virtues nor the vices are passions, because we are not called good or bad on the ground of our virtues and our vices, and because we are neither praised nor blamed for our passions (for the man who feels fear or anger is not praised, nor is the man who simply feels anger blamed, but the man who feels it in a certain way), but for our virtues and our vices we are praised or blamed.
Anger | Appetite | Character | Confidence | Envy | Example | Fear | Feelings | Good | Joy | Longing | Man | Pain | Pity | Pleasure | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |
The greatest gift that extraordinarily successful people have over the average person is their ability to get themselves to take action.
Many have declared the ultimate truth openly: that only the self is, that you are nothing other than the Self, that the universe is a mere manifestation of the Self, without inherent reality, existing only in the Self. This can be understood by the analogy of a dream. The whole dream-world with all its people and events exist only in the mind of the dreamer. Its creation or emergence takes nothing away from him, and its dissolution or reabsorption adds nothing to him; he remains the same before, during, and after. God, the conscious Dreamer of the cosmic dream, is the Self, and no person in the dream has any reality apart from the Self of which he is an expression. By discarding the illusion of otherness, you can realize that identity with the Self which always was, is, and will be, beyond the conditions of life and time. Then, since you are One with the Dreamer, the whole universe, including your life and all others, is your dream and none of the events in it have more than a dream reality. You are set free from hope and desire, fear and frustration, and established in the unchanging Bliss of Pure Being.
Desire | Events | Fear | God | Hope | Illusion | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | People | Reality | Self | Time | Truth | Universe | Will | World |
What you are is God’s gift to you; what you make of yourself is your gift to God.
God |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
It is the historical function of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as stepping stones to the progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight, and the gift of ever more grace to act on this insight.
Grace | Insight | Revelation |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
No conjunction can possibly occur, however fearful, however tremendous it may appear, from which a man by his own energy may not extricate himself.
Big goals can create a fear of failure. Lack of goals guarantees it.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Beginning | Cruelty | Fear | Superstition | Wisdom |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Men can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth- even more than death. Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; though its merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-trained wisdom of ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world and the chief glory of man. But if thought is to become the possession of the many, and not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds man back - fear that their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear least they themselves prove less worthy to the respect they have supposed themselves to be.
Authority | Death | Earth | Fear | Glory | Hell | Light | Looks | Man | Men | Nothing | Respect | Thought | Wisdom | World | Respect | Privilege | Thought |