This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.
A knowledge of our existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
Beauty | Existence | Knowledge | Man | Reason | Sense | Wisdom |
There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science.
Children | Mathematics | Music | Passion | People | Wisdom |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
The only true knowledge of our fellowman is that which enables us to feel with him - which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.
Heart | Knowledge | Opinion | Wisdom | Circumstance |
Be sure to find a place for intellectual and cultural interests outside your daily occupation. It is necessary that you do so if this business of living is not to turn to dust and ashes in your mouth. Moreover, do not overlook the claims of religion as the explanation of an otherwise unintelligible world. It is not the fast tempo of modern life that kills but the boredom, a lack of strong interest and failure to grow that destroy. It is the feeling that nothing is worth while that makes men ill and unhappy.
Business | Destroy | Failure | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Occupation | Religion | Wisdom | World | Worth | Failure | Business |
It is certainly strange to observe... how many people seem to feel vain of their own unqualified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.
Existence | Knowledge | Man | Meaning | Mind | Reality | Will | Wisdom | World | Understand |