This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
[In the cave allegory] those whose who are destitute of philosophy may be compared to prisoners in a cave, who are only able to look in one direction because they are bound, and who have a fire behind them and a wall in front. Between them and the wall there is nothing; all that they see are shadows of themselves, and of objects behind them, cast on the wall by the light of the fire. Inevitably they regard these shadows as real, and have no notion of the objects to which they are due. At last some man succeeds in escaping from the cave to the light of the sun; for the first time he sees real things, and becomes aware that he had hitherto been deceived by shadows. If he is the sort of philosopher who is fit to become a guardian, he will feel it his duty to those who were formerly his fellow prisoners to go down again into the cave, instruct them as to the truth, and show them the way up. But he will have difficulty in persuading them, because, coming out of the sunlight, he will see shadows less clearly than they do, and will seem to them stupider than before his escape.
Difficulty | Duty | Light | Man | Nothing | Philosophy | Regard | Time | Truth | Will |
The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.
Circumstances | Comfort | Indifference | Luxury | Need |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Error | Religion | Science | Superstition |
Ideals are ideas or beliefs when these are objects not only of contemplation or affirmation but also of hope, desire, endeavor, admiration and resolve.
Admiration | Contemplation | Desire | Hope | Ideals | Ideas | Contemplation |
The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.
Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principle reason why men are so often useless is, that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in his duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself, which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? The debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature?
Beauty | Debt | Duty | Folly | Genius | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Man | Mankind | Money | Nature | Thought | Wisdom | Beauty | Thought |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
It is neither possible for man to know the truth fully nor to avoid the error of pretending that he does.
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
The man of contemplation walks alone. He lives desireless amidst the objects of desire. The Atman is his eternal satisfaction. He sees the Atman present in all things.
Contemplation | Desire | Eternal | Man | Present | Contemplation |
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist. When thought objects vanish, the thinking-subject vanishes, as when the mind vanishes, objects vanish. Things are objects because there is a subject or mind; and the mind is a subject because there are objects. Understand the relativity of these two and the basic reality; the unity of emptiness. In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world. If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion.
Mind | Opinion | Prejudice | Reality | Thinking | Thought | Unity | Will | World | Old | Thought | Understand |
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaption to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
Error | Evolution | Nature | Perfection |
Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
Admiration | Envy | Fame | Mankind | Pleasure |