This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.
Consciousness | Nature | Reality | World | Value |
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given. To gain the supreme victory, it is necessary, for one thing, that by and through their natural differentiation men and women unequivocally affirm their brotherhood.
Absolute | Anarchy | Ethics | Existence | Freedom | Heart | Individual | Law | Man | Means | Merit | Oppression | Power | Relationship | Sense | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Value |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It's completely stupid to write love letters, cannot be reproduced by a simple letter, but what to do when this terrible ocean separates us from the man we love?
Emotions | Experience | Instinct | Motives | Opinion | Order | Value |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
What is certain is that now it is very difficult for women to take at once their status as autonomous individual and her female destiny, is the source of the awkwardness and discomfort that sometimes presented as a lost sex. And it is certainly more convenient to suffer the blind slavery to work for liberation: the dead are also better adapted to the living earth.
Value |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.
Abstract | Art | Assertion | Death | Doctrine | Earth | Ethics | Evil | Existence | Existentialism | Good | Guarantee | Heaven | Individual | Justify | Life | Life | Love | Man | Men | Need | Paradise | Pride | Reason | Salvation | System | Thinking | Time | Truth | Universe | Weakness | Will | Work | World | Art | Old | Value |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.
Absolute | Choice | Distinguish | Ends | Failure | Justify | Man | Meaning | Necessity | Nothing | Order | Passion | Reason | Relationship | Will | World | Failure | Value |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
We often err by contemplating an individual solely in his relation and behaviour to us, and generalizing from that with more rapidity than wisdom. We might as well argue that the moon has no rotation about her axis, because the same hemisphere is always presented to our view.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
Be cheerful, no matter what reverse obstruct your pathway, or what plagues follow you in your trail to annoy you. Ask yourself what is to be gained by looking or feeling sad when troubles throng around you, or how your condition is to be alleviated by abandoning yourself to despondency. If you are a young man, nature designed you to be of good cheer; and should you find your road to fortune, fame, or respectability, or any other boon to which your young heart aspires, a little thorny, consider it all for the best, and that these impediments are only thrown in your way to induce greater efforts and more patient endurance on your part. Far better spend a whole life in diligent, aye, cheerful and unremitting toil, though you never attain the pinnacle of your ambitious desires, than to turn back at the first appearance of misfortune, and allow despair to unnerve your energies, or sour your naturally sweet and cheerful disposition. If you are of the softer, fairer portion of humanity, be cheerful; though we know full well that most affections are sweet to you when compared with disappointment and neglect, yet let hope banish despair and ill forebodings. Be cheerful: do not brood over fond hopes unrealized, until a chain, link after link, is fastened on each thought and wound around the heart. Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the travelling monument of despair and melancholy.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
At last, however, his conversation became unbearable--a foul young man is odious, but a foul old one is surely the most sickening thing on earth. One feels that the white upon the hair, like that upon the mountain, should signify a height attained.
Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL
Fascination with the psychic - or the psychological - can be a dangerous sidetrack on any spiritual path.
But Buddha, in his wisdom, realized that you can’t love others fully until you learn to love yourself. If you search throughout the entire universe, he often said, you won’t find anyone more deserving of love and affection than yourself. So begin the practice of metta by first extending it to yourself.
I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.
Value |
I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.
Conservation | Life | Life | Little | Value |
The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
Appearance | Evolution | Means | Theories | Value |
What constitutes the primordium of the adult parasite [Rhizocephala ]? What can be injected through the narrow opening of the dart's hypodermic device? ...Imagine going through such complexity as nauplius, cyprid, and kentrogon - and then paring yourself down to just a few cells for a quick and hazardous transition to the adult stage. What a minimal bridge at such a crucial transition! ...But other species have achieved the ultimate reduction to a single cell! The dart injects just one cell into the host's interior, and the two parts of the life cyle maintain their indispensable continuity by an absolutely minimal connection - as though, within the rhizocephalan life cycle, nature has inserted a stage analogous to the fertilized egg that establishes minimal connection between generations in ordinary sexual organisms.
Day | Difficulty | Famous | Labor | Right | Struggle | Value |
We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics.
Value |
Without the heart it is no worship; it is a stage play; an acting a part without being that person really which is acted by us: a hypocrite, in the notion of the world, is a stage-player. We may as well say a man may believe with his body, as worship God only with his body. Faith is a great ingredient in worship; and it is “with the heart man believes unto righteousness.” We may be truly said to worship God, though we want perfection; but we cannot be said to worship him if we want sincerity; a statue upon a tomb, with eyes and hands lifted up, offers as good and true a service; it wants only a voice, the gestures and postures are the same; nay, the service is better; it is not a mockery; it represents all that it can be framed to; but to worship without our spirits, is a presenting God with a picture, an echo, voice, and nothing else; a compliment; a mere lie; a “compassing him about with lies.”
Desire | Faith | Growth | Humility | Receive | Sincerity | Value |