This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
All our distinctions are accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it is so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility.
Beauty | Censure | Mankind | Opinion | Praise | Qualities | Responsibility | Wisdom | Beauty |
John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
The world is full of paradox. For example, [in Buddhism] though no notion of a creator is entertained, great stress is laid upon the need for faith and piety. By faith is meant not trust in a benevolent diety avid for love, praise and obedience, but conviction that beyond the seeming reality misreported by our senses which is inherently unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively perceived, will give our lives undreamed-of meaning and endow the most insignificant object with holiness and beauty.
Beauty | Example | Faith | Love | Meaning | Mystery | Need | Obedience | Object | Paradox | Piety | Praise | Reality | Trust | Will | World |
Saint Bonaventure, born John of Fidanza Bonaventure
If there be any man who is not enlightened by this sublime magnificence of created things, he is blind. If there be any man who is not aroused by the clamor of nature, he is deaf. If there be any one who, seeing all these works of God, does not praise him, he is dumb; if there be any one who, from so many signs, cannot perceive the First Principle, that man is foolish.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
Evil | Good | Immortality | Little | Thought | Universe | Wisdom | Thought |
Peter Abelard, Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; French: Pierre Abélard
For as a picture is often more beautiful and worthy of commendation if some colors in themselves are included in it, than it would be if it were uniform and of a single color, so from an admixture of evil the universe is rendered more beautiful and worthy of commendation.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The poet is the equable man, not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns, nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad, he bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less, he is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key... As he sees the farthest he has the most faith, his thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things, in the dispute on God and eternity he is silent, he sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement, he sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.
Dispute | Dreams | Eternity | Faith | God | Good | Man | Men | Nothing | Object | Play | Praise | Wisdom | God |
Abū al-Hasan Alī ibn Ismā'īl al-Ash'arī
Nothing can be evil on the part of God. For a thing is evil on our part only because we transgress the limit and bound set for us and do what we have no right to do. But the creator is subject to no one and bound by no command.
How we view life is ultimately that which gives us meaning, value and purpose… Our worldview determines how we solve these problems: What are we? Where did we come from? What does it mean to be human? What is truth? What is the meaning and purpose of life? Why is there so much evil in the world? How should we live? What happens when we die? Does it matter?
Evil | Life | Life | Meaning | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Truth | World | Value |
Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
Censure is often useful, praise often deceitful.
Any government is in itself an evil insofar as it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny.
Evil | Government | Tyranny | Government |
As a solid rock cannot be moved by the wind, the wise are not shaken by praise or blame.