This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been its negative character. It has aimed at the repression of faults rather than the creation of virtues.
Character | Earth | Education | Objectives | Public | System | Trouble |
J. G. Fichte, fully Johann Gottlieb Fichte
What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it. A person indolent by nature or dulled and distorted by mental servitude, learned luxury, and vanity will never raise himself to the level of idealism.
Character | Idealism | Luxury | Man | Nature | Philosophy | Servitude | Soul | System | Will |
Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.
Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |
The only difference betwixt the natural vices and justice lies in this, that the good, which results from the former, arises from every single act, and is the object of some natural passion: whereas a single act of justice, consider’d in itself, may often be contrary to the public good; and ‘tis only the concurrence of mankind, in a general scheme or system of action, which is advantageous.
Action | Character | Good | Justice | Mankind | Object | Passion | Public | System |
Where is the reward of virtue? and what recompense has nature provided for such important sacrifices as those of life and fortune, which we must often make to it? O sons of earth! Are ye ignorant of the value of this celestial mistress? And do ye meanly inquire for her portion, when ye observe her genuine beauty?
Beauty | Character | Earth | Fortune | Important | Life | Life | Nature | Recompense | Reward | Virtue | Virtue | Value |
Our belief in truth itself.. that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives.
Belief | Better | Character | Desire | Position | System | Thinking | Truth |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain.
Character | Fraud | Present | Sacrifice | Society | System | Virtue | Virtue | War | Will | Society |
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is in itself an act of happiness. It is the flower of a long inner life of joy and contentment; it tells of peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul... No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.
Character | Contentment | Joy | Life | Life | Reward | Soul |
Who thinks of reward serves himself, not God.
Neil Monro, sometimes wrote under pen name Hugh Foulis
To the acquisition of the rare quality of politeness, so much of the enlightened understanding is necessary that I cannot but consider every book in every science, which tends to make us wiser, and of course better men, as a treatise on a more enlarged system of politeness.
Better | Character | Men | Science | System | Understanding |