This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. EveryÂone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him.
Dignity | Effort | Good | Learning | Mortal | Nobility | Paradox | Time | Unique |
After all, Kierkegaard was hardly a disinterested scientist. He gave his psychological description because he had a glimpse of freedom for man. He was a theorist of the open personality, of human possibility. In this pursuit, present-day psychiatry lags far behind him. Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what "health" is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment—anything but that, as he has taken such excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a "normal cultural man" is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick—whether one knows it or not: "there is such a thing as fictitious health."38 Nietzsche later put the same thought: "Are there perhaps —a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of health?" But Kierkegaard not only posed the question, he also answered it. If health is not "cultural normality," then it must refer to something else, must point beyond man's usual situation, his habitual ideas. Mental health, in a word, is not typical, but ideal-typical. It is something far beyond man, something to be achieved, striven for, something that leads man beyond himself. The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself.
Isolation | Openness | Personality | Rank | Work |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
Better | Care | Day | Dispute | Excitement | Knowing | World |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
Noise |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I had gone... to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.
Better | Care | Day | Dispute | Excitement | Good | Knowing | Lord | World |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.
Better | Courage | Good | Kill | Light | Loneliness | Love | Man | People | Time | Will | Wishes | World | Afraid |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and woman have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Wash someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else?
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
What we have today, in modern industrial society, is not romantic and certainly not utopianÂ…But it is in very deep trouble and holds no promise of survival. We jolly well have to have the courage to dream if we want to survive and give our children a chance of survival.
Education | Metaphysics | Present | Soul | World | Understand |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.
Erwin Rommel, fully Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel
Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy in complete command of the air, fights like a savage against modern European troops, under the same handicaps and with the same chances of success.
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The value of the life of these lower savages is like that of the anthropoid apes, or very little higher. All recent travelers who have carefully observed them in their native lands, and studied their bodily structure and psychic life, agree in this opinion.
Appreciation | Body | Science | Appreciation | Learn |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
It might be said that energy is for the mechanical world what consciousness is for the human world. If energy fails, everything fails.
Men |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The doctrine of derivation, or theory of descent, as a comprehensive theory of the natural origin of all organisms, assumes that all compound organisms are derived from simple ones, all many-celled animals and plants from single-celled ones, and these last from quite simple primary organisms—from monads. As we see the organic species, the multiform varieties of animals and plants, vary under our eyes through adaptation, while the similarity of their internal structure is reasonably explicable only by inheritance from common parent-forms, we are forced to assume common parent-forms for at least the great main divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and for the classes, orders, and so forth.
Reason |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Although we are in possession of all requisite knowledge, it still requires a systematic, creative effort to bring this technology into active existence and make it generally visible and available. It is my experience that it is rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
In other words, everybody claims to achieve freedom by his own "system" and accuses every other "system" as inevitably entailing tyranny, totalitarianism, or anarchy leading to both.
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.
Present |