This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
The wider the scope of my reflection on the present and past, the more I am impressed by their mockery of human plans in every transaction.
Mockery | Past | Present | Reflection |
The whole record of civilization is a record of the failure of money as a higher incentive. The enormous majority of men never make any serious effort to get rich. The few who are sordid enough to do so easily become millionaires with a little luck, and astonish the others by the contrast between their riches and their stupidity... The belief in money as an incentive is founded on the observation that people will do for money what they will not do for anything else.
Belief | Civilization | Contrast | Effort | Enough | Failure | Little | Luck | Majority | Men | Money | Observation | People | Riches | Stupidity | Will | Riches | Failure |
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself.
Action | Contrast | Eternity | Existence | Future | History | Hope | Imagination | Mind | Past | Time | Universe | Will |
Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing left to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not-world. For it is impossible reflectively to know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names.
Acceptance | Concealment | God | Know thyself | Knowledge | Man | Nothing | Reflection | Self | Soul | Truth | World | God |
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
What is thought to be the responsible public opinion is, at any given time, a reflection of the needs and interests of the corporate technostructure.
Always vote for principle, though you vote alone, and you may cherish the sweet reflection that your vote is never lost.
Discourses on morality and reflection on human nature are the best means we can make use of to improve our minds, gain a true knowledge of ourselves, and recover our souls out of the vice, ignorance, and prejudice which naturally cleave to them.
Human nature | Ignorance | Knowledge | Means | Morality | Nature | Prejudice | Reflection |
For the reality to which the artist and the mystic are exposed, is in fact, the same. It is of their own inmost truth brought to consciousness: by the mystic, in direct confrontation, and by the artist, through reflection in the masterworks of his art. The fact that the nature of the artist (as a microcosm) and the nature of the universe (as the macrocosm) are two aspects of the same reality (respectively, as a minute part of the whole, experienced from within, and as the whole, viewed from without... accounts sufficiently for that creative interplay of discovery and recognition which alerts the artist to the possibility of a revelatory composition in which outer and inner realities are recognized as the same.
Art | Consciousness | Discovery | Nature | Reality | Reflection | Truth | Universe | Discovery |
Creative people have always felt separated from their societies. It’s as if they see too well the contrast between what is and what could be.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Action and reflection should ideally complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent.
Action | Reflection |
God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to reflection is the thinking of the mind.
God | Individual | Mind | Reflection | Thinking |
Every substance is only the reflection or rhyme of some truth.
Reflection | Truth |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
No poet, no artist, of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
Aesthetic | Appreciation | Art | Contrast | Criticism | Meaning | Necessity | Order | Work | Appreciation | Art | Value |
It is wrong to believe that frank sentiments and the candor of the mind are the exclusive share of the young; they ornament oftentimes old age, upon which they seem to spread a chaste reflection of the modest graces of their younger days, where they shine with the same brightness as those flowers which are often seen peeping, fresh and laughing, from among ruins.
Edgar Degas, born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
Art | Reflection | Study | Art |
Philosophy is concerned with that which is, in contrast with that which seems to be. Its aim is to reveal the reality which underlies appearance.
Appearance | Contrast | Philosophy | Reality |