This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In every visible Creature there is a Body and a Spirit... or, more Active and more Passive Principle, which may fitly be termed Male and Female, by reason of that Analogy a Husband hath with his Wife. For as the ordinary Generation of Men requires a Conjunction and Co-operation of Male and Female; so also all Generations and Productions whatsoever they be, require an Union, and conformable Operation of those Two Principles, to wit, Spirit and Body; but the Spirit is an Eye or Light beholding its own proper Image, and the Body is a Tenebrosity or Darkness receiving that Image, when the Spirit looks thereinto, as when one sees himself in a Looking-Glass; for certainly he cannot so behold himself in the Transparent Air, nor in any Diaphanous Body, because the reflexion of an Image requires a certain opacity or darkness, which we call a Body: Yet to be a Body is not an Essential property of any Thing; as neither is it a Property of any Thing to be dark; for nothing is so dark that nothing else, neither differs any thing from a Spirit, but in that it is more dark; therefore by how much the thicker and grosser it is become, so much the more remote it is from the degree of Spirit, so that this distinction is only modal and gradual, not essential or substantial.
Body | Darkness | Distinction | Husband | Light | Looks | Men | Nothing | Principles | Property | Reason | Spirit | Wife | Wisdom | Wit |
Nathanial Culverwell, also spelled Nathaniel Culverwell
See, then, how powerful religion is; it commands the heart, it commands the vitals. Morality - that comes with a pruning-knife, and cuts off the sproutings, all wild and luxuriances; but religion lays the axe to the root of the tree. Morality looks that the skin of the apple be fair; but religion searcheth to the very core.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.
Achievement | Wisdom |
The devotion of thought to an honest achievement makes the achievement possible.
Achievement | Devotion | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell
Take it for granted that the greater your achievement the more genuine will be the surprise of your friends and neighbors.
Achievement | Will | Wisdom | Friends |
Randolph S. Foster, fully Randolph Sinks Foster
He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It has always seemed to me that ruthlessness and arrogant self-confidence constitute the indispensable condition for what, when it succeeds, strike us as greatness. And I also believe that one ought to differentiate between greatness of achievement and greatest of personality.
Achievement | Confidence | Greatness | Indispensable | Personality | Ruthlessness | Self | Self-confidence | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development as supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.
Achievement | Belief | Civilization | Existence | Faith | Illusion | Instinct | Perfection | Present | Wisdom | Work |
Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.
Apathy | Blame | Envy | Existence | Looks | Man | Time | Tranquility | Wisdom | Old |
Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
Judaism looks upon all human beings as children of one Father; thinks of them as all created in the image of God, and insists that a man be judged not by his religion, but his action.
Action | Children | Father | God | Looks | Man | Religion | Wisdom |