This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
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 |
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 |
To be an object of hatred and aversion to their contemporaries has been the usual fate of all those whose merit has raised them above the common level. The man who submits to the shafts of envy for the sake of noble objects pursues a judicious course for his own lasting fame. Hatred dies with its object, while merit soon breaks forth in full splendor, and his glory is handed down to posterity in never-dying strains.
Envy | Fame | Fate | Glory | Man | Merit | Object | Posterity | Fate |
Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate.
Imagination | World |
Émile Durkheim, fully David Émile Durkheim
A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt. If it cannot discover the claims to existence of the objects of its questioning -- and it would be miraculous if it so soon succeeded in solving so many mysteries -- it will deny them all reality, the mere formulation of the problem already implying an inclination to negative solutions. But in so doing it will become void of all positive content and, finding nothing which offers it resistance, will launch itself perforce into the emptiness of inner revere.
Doubt | Enough | Existence | Ignorance | Inclination | Mind | Nothing | Reality | Will |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas. But if I too have failed to convey all that has been tormenting me for the last six months, it will, anyway, be understood that I have paid very dearly for attaining my present "last conviction." This is what I felt necessary, for certain objects of my own, to put forward in my "Explanation". However, I will continue.
Eugène Delacroix, fully Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix
Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask: What up to now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by their sequence they will yield to you a basic law of your true self. Compare them and see how they form a ladder on which you have so far climbed up toward yourself.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
Jealousy |