This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What then does propter hoc add to post hoc? At the factual level, nothing at all, so long as the conjunction is constant in either case... In nature one thing just happens after another. Cause and effect have their place only in our imaginative arrangements and extensions of these primary facts.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Did you guess any thing lived only its moment? The world does not so exist, no parts palpable or impalpable so exist, no consummation exists without being from some long previous consummation, and that from some other, without the farthest conceivable one coming a bit nearer the beginning than any.
That which is to be most desired in America is oneness and not sameness. Sameness is the worst thing that could happen to the people of this country. To make all people the same would lower their quality, but oneness would raise it.
The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.
Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
The most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The most important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence and it marks the difference between a man of sense and a fool.
Peter Abelard, Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; French: Pierre Abélard
In fact we say that an intention is good, that is, right in itself, but that an action does not bear any good in itself but proceeds from a good intention. Whence when the same thing is done by the same man at different times, by the diversity of his intention, however, his action is now said to be good, now bad.
Action | Diversity | Good | Inquiry | Intention | Man | Right | Truth | Wisdom |
A thing is known according to the state of consciousness of the knower.
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
It is a prejudice to believe that knowledge is always rational, that there is no such thing as irrational knowledge. Actually, we apprehend a great deal more through feeling than by intellection.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get alone without education. Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get alone without the use of his intelligence.
Education | Intelligence | Man | Wisdom |
Al-Qushayri, fully Abd al-Karīm ibn Hawāzin Qushayri NULL
He who truly fears a thing flees from it, but he who truly fears God flees unto Him.
Thomas Wolfe, fully Thomas Clayton Wolfe
The young men of this land are called a "lost" race - they are a race that has never yet been discovered. And the whole secret, power, and knowledge of their own discovery is locked within them - they know it, feel it, have the whole thing in them - and they cannot utter it.
Discovery | Knowledge | Land | Men | Power | Race | Wisdom | Discovery |