This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence, born Frederick Lawrence
If I were asked to sum up in a single phrase the main purpose of individual life I would express it as the enlargement of personality. Unless an individual can transcend the limits of class, sex, race, age and creed, his personality remains of necessity to that extent incomplete.
Age | Character | Creed | Individual | Life | Life | Necessity | Personality | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Wisdom |
We live in a narrow reality, partly conditioned by our form of perception and partly made by opinions that we have borrowed, to which our self-esteem is fastened. We fight for our opinions, not because we believe them but because they involve the ordinary feeling of oneself. Though we are continually being hurt owing to the narrowness of the reality in which we dwell, we blame life, and do not see the necessity of finding absolutely new standpoints. All ideas that have a transforming power change our sense of reality.
Blame | Change | Character | Esteem | Ideas | Life | Life | Necessity | Perception | Power | Reality | Self | Self-esteem | Sense |
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
Let honor be to us as strong an obligation as necessity is to others.
Character | Honor | Necessity | Obligation |
Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
If there is an evil in this world, it is sorrow and heaviness of heart. The loss of goods, of healthy, of coronets and mitres, is only evil as they occasion sorrow; take that out, the rest is fancy, and dwelleth only in the head of man.
Character | Evil | Heart | Man | Rest | Sorrow | World | Loss |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
What do you call Love, Hate, Charity, Revenge, Humanity, Magnanimity, Forgiveness? Different results of the one Master Impulse: the necessity of securing one's self-approval.
Character | Charity | Forgiveness | Hate | Humanity | Impulse | Love | Magnanimity | Necessity | Revenge | Self | Self-approval |
Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
Religion is a hunger for beauty and love and glory. It is wonder and the mystery and majesty, passion and ecstasy. It is emotion as well as mind, feeling as well as knowing, the subjective as well as the objective. It is the heart soaring to heights the head alone will never know; the apprehension of meanings science alone will never find; the awareness of values ethics alone will never reveal. It is the human spirit yearning for, and finding, something infinitely greater than itself which it calls God.
Awareness | Beauty | Ecstasy | Ethics | Glory | God | Heart | Hunger | Knowing | Love | Mind | Mystery | Passion | Religion | Science | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Wonder | Beauty | Awareness |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; the scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer, this head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.
Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.
Action | Choice | Evil | Good | Knowledge | Nature | Necessity | People | Poetry | Wisdom |
I have always been subconsciously embarrassed by the “function” of Christmas and New Years - the spirit of “loving kindness,” that is presumed to come to a head like a boil once a year, when it has been magnificently concealed up to that moment!
Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
Destiny is the scapegoat which we make responsible for all our crimes and follies; a necessity which we set down for invincible when we have no wish to strive against it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Society is a wall of very strong masonry, as it now stands; it may be sapped in the course of a thousand years, but stormed in a day - no! You dash your head against it - you scatter your brains, and you dislodge a stone. Society smiles in scorn, effaces the stain, and replaces the stone.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead, in the perfectly definite sense it is not alive.
Contradiction | Future | Necessity | Nothing | Past | Present | Sense | Wisdom |
True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. To cast away the old is not of necessity to attain the new. To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"
Conservatism | Good | Necessity | Order | Power | Progress | Question | Wisdom | Old |
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
Anarchy | Consciousness | Existence | Freedom | History | Individual | Man | Means | Necessity | Organization | Plan | Society | Struggle | Time | Will | Wisdom |