This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.
Art | Daring | Evil | Existence | Good | Honor | Indifference | Judgment | Man | Nothing | Opinion | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Receive | Art | Learn | Vice |
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves.
Circumstance | Vice |
Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.
Common mission trap for companies: trying to be all things to all people at all times
Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails and impious men bear away, The post of honor is a private station.
Leadership os communicating the company's Vision and Mission and having the courage to follow it. Companies that endure have a noble purpose.
Leadership is communicating the company's Vision and Mission and having the courage to follow it. Companies that endure have a noble purpose.
The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.
Life, by which I mean my life, is a great, or probably the greatest, design, from its very beginning to its end, the end that, I think, is unlikely to exist. Each and every bit of life is a part of the design. Design exists as the consequence of the ultimate questioner's vanity. And my mission is to find the most fundamental truth, which probably and exclusively involves the nature of the existence of the ultimate questioner.
Beginning | Design | Existence | Life | Life | Mission | Nature |