This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in one hundred years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt... It is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics.
Debt | Law | Life | Life | Mathematics | Nature | Tomorrow | Will |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.
Law |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Happy the man who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to nature and God.
A law is valuable not because it is a law, but because there is right in it.
Providence is but another name for natural law. Natural law itself would go out in a minute if it were not for the divine thought that is behind it.
Law | Providence | Thought | Thought |
Who are the really disloyal? Those who inflame racial hatreds, who sow religious and class dissensions. those who subvert the Constitution by violating the freedom of the ballot box. Those who make a mockery of majority rule by the use of the filibuster. Those who impair democracy by denying equal educational facilities. Those who frustrate justice by lynch law or by making a farce of jury trials. Those who deny freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly. Those who demand special favors against the interest of the commonwealth. Those who regard public office as a source of private gain. Those who exalt the military over the civil. Those who for selfish and private purposes stir up national antagonisms and expose the world to the ruin of war.
Democracy | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justice | Law | Majority | Mockery | Office | Public | Regard | Rule | Speech | Trials | War | World |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.
Conformity | Law | Vengeance |
All alterations take place in conformity with the law of connection of cause and effect.
Cause | Conformity | Law |
Freedom and the consciousness of it as a faculty of following the moral law with unyielding resolution is independence of inclinations, at least as motives determining (though not as affecting) our desire, and so far as I am conscious of this freedom in following my moral maxims, it is the only source of an unaltered contentment which is necessarily connected with it and rests on no special feeling.
Consciousness | Contentment | Desire | Freedom | Law | Maxims | Moral law | Motives | Resolution | Following |
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
The moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.
Cruelty | Eternity | Law | Lust | Moral law | Oppression | Price | Cruelty |
The law is not a holy thing. … The law is made by very mortal people, very limited people, very opinionated people, and people who have very special interests. They make the law, they tell us what the law is, and then they tell us its holy writ.
Morality... must have the more power over the human heart the more purely it is exhibited. Whence it follows that, if the law of morality and the image of holiness and virtue are to exercise any influence at all on our souls, they can do so only so far as they are laid to heart in their purity as motives, unmixed with any view to prosperity, for it is in suffering that they display themselves most nobly.
Display | Heart | Influence | Law | Morality | Motives | Power | Prosperity | Purity | Suffering | Virtue | Virtue |
The moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect. For all these effects - agreeableness of one’s condition and even the promotion of the happiness of others - could have been also brought about by other causes, so that for this there would have been no need of the will of a rational being; whereas it is in this alone that the supreme and unconditional good can be found. The pre-eminent good which we call moral can therefore consist in nothing else than the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a rational being, in so far as this conception, and not the expected effect, determines the will. This is a good which is already present in the person who acts accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear first in the result.
Action | Good | Law | Need | Nothing | Present | Will | Worth | Happiness |