This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for ends and realities, whilst they are properly symbols only; when we have come, by a divine leading [illness?] into the inner firmament, we are apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we esteem final.
There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; there is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite love the benefit.
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a human intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race.
Assertion | Contempt | Crime | Falsehood | Human race | Intelligence | Race | Wise |
You’re searching... for things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings – there are no such things. There are only middles.
Ends |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
It is a good thing to believe; it is a good thing to admire. By continually looking upwards; as a man, by indulging in habits of scorn and contempt for others, is sure to descend to the level of those he despises.
William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
Leisure and solitude are the best effect of riches, because mother of thought. Both are avoided by most rich men, who seek company and business, which are signs of being weary of themselves.
Business | Leisure | Men | Mother | Riches | Solitude | Thought |
Anger begins with Folly, and ends with Repentance.
Anger | Ends | Folly | Repentance |
To be remembered after we are dead is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
Contempt | Recompense |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
Art | Ends | Hypothesis | Philosophy | Science |
Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown; our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.