This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every civilization rests on a set of promises... If the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
Civilization | Faith | Hope | Wisdom |
Henry Christopher "H.C." Bailey
The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.
Civilization | Determination | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |
Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL
For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.
Unless there is a recovery of the true dualism or, what amounts to the same thing, a reaffirmation of the truths of the inner life in some form - traditional or critical, religious or humanistic - civilization in any sense that has been attached to that term hitherto is threatened at its base.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
If civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and knowledge which society pours into the individual at each new generation. Scratch the surface, abolish everything we owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or something very near it.
Civilization | Education | Humanity | Individual | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict.
Doubt | Effort | Energy | Evolution | Life | Life | Power | Will | Wisdom | Work | World |