This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Seek not proud wealth; but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contently, yet have not any abstract or friarly contempt of it.
Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Life as a sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. Many diverse details have a bearing on the preservation of life, and when we have our eyes on the future we have to engage ourselves in these details. But the only thing that is necessary is to live now, the future is not absolute but ever exposed to accident. Hence it is only the necessity of the immediate present which can justify a wrong action, because not to do the action would in turn be to cause not to do the action would in turn be to commit an offense, indeed the most wrong of all offenses, namely the complete destruction of the embodiment of freedom.
Absolute | Abstract | Accident | Action | Cause | Ends | Example | Freedom | Future | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Offense | Present | Property | Right | Rights | Self | Self-preservation | Wrong |
Every attempt at social leveling ends with leveling to the bottom, never to the top.
Ends |
The company in which you will improve most will be least expensive to you.
Will |
Human life, because it is marked by a beginning and an end, becomes whole, an entirety in itself that can be subjected to judgment only when it has ended in death. Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
Enough |
There is a principle that is guaranteed to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought.
Ends | Intuition | Knowledge | Mind | Nothing | Reason | Sense | Thought | Understanding | Unity |
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
Control | Ends | Nature | Understanding |
Act only on that maxim [intention] whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature. Always act so as to treat humanity, whether in yourself or in others, as an end in itself, never merely as a means. Act always as if to bring about, and as a member of, a Kingdom of Ends [that is, an ideal community in which everyone is always moral].
Action | Ends | Humanity | Intention | Law | Means | Nature | Time | Will |
No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones.
Ambition | Children | Contempt | Disdain | Industry | Knowledge | Little | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Ambition | Vice |