This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have the time. But the present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own. Past opportunitiesare gone, future are not come.
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.
Citizenship | Freedom | Good | Justice | Reason | Right | Rights | Society | Thought | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Society | Loss |
The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it.
The real advantage which truth has consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such a head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
Circumstances | Opinion | Time | Truth | Will |
There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life.
Discretion | Impertinence | Learning | Life | Life | Looks | Man | Mind | Pedantry | Perfection | Prejudice | Qualities | Rest | Virtue | Virtue | Wants | Weakness | Will | Wit | Work | World | Talent | Value |
Silence never shows itself to so great an advantage as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation, provided that we give no just occasion for them.
Being morally good, for the majority of Americans, means following the norms and values of their society or culture - whether this be their peer culture, their church, their country, or a combination of these. The theory that morality is relative to societal norms is known in moral philosophy as cultural relativism. Many others claim that morality is relative to the individual and is different for every person depending on what they feel. This theory is known in philosophy as ethical subjectivism.
Church | Culture | Good | Individual | Majority | Means | Morality | Philosophy | Society | Society | Following |
Directly stated, the evolution of the entire universe - stars, elements, life, man - is a process of drawing something out of nothing, out of the utter void of nonbeing. The creative element in the mind of man - the latency which can conceive gods, carve statues, move the heart with the symbols of great poetry, or devise the formulas of modern physics - emerge in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts.
Evolution | Existence | Heart | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nothing | Poetry | Universe |
Evolution... is comprehensible only if we admit that it is dominated by a finality, a precise and distant goal... telefinality orients the march of evolution as a whole and has acted, ever since the appearance of life on earth, as a distant directing force tending to develop a being endowed with a conscience, a spiritually and morally perfect being. To attain this goal, this force acts on the laws of the unorganized world in such a way that the normal play of the second law of thermodynamics is always deflected in the same direction.
Appearance | Conscience | Earth | Evolution | Force | Law | Life | Life | Play | World |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Our drive toward novelty is a tool of evolution and transcendence.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma
Physics has discovered the edge of infinity; the wisdom of the ages takes us across the border, which is nowhere but in us. When each person rejoins the stream of evolution that upholds the galaxies ands sweeps life forward on the wave of eternity, human existence will cease to contain any suffering, and our real purpose in living - to create heaven on earth - will be realized.
Earth | Eternity | Evolution | Existence | Heaven | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Suffering | Will | Wisdom |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
We cannot employ the mind to advantage when we are filled with excessive food and drink.
Mind |
We cannot leave behind us the sins of our past. We must not forget that nothing disappears. Everything is eternal. Everything that has been is still in existence. The whole history of humanity is the “history of crime”... Man must go back, seek for, and destroy the causes of evil however far back they lie. It is only in this idea that the hint of the possibilities of a general evolution can be found. It is only in this idea that the possibility of changing the karma of humanity lies, because changing the karma means changing the past... There will be no possibility of thinking of evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving man to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there.
Crime | Destroy | Eternal | Evil | Evolution | Existence | History | Humanity | Man | Means | Nothing | Past | Present | Struggle | Thinking | Will |
The dispute between the theory of a predestined future and the theory of a free future is an endless dispute. This is so because both theories are too literal, too rigid, too material, and the one excludes the other... The opposites are both equally wrong because the truth lies in the unification of these two opposite understandings into one whole. At any given moment all the future of the world is predestined and existing - provided no new factor comes in. And a new factor can only come in from the side of consciousness and the will resulting from it.
Consciousness | Dispute | Future | Theories | Truth | Will | World | Wrong |
The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting.
I have a theory of power: That if it's going to be responsible, it has to have something to lose.
Power |