This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
We do not need more intellectual power; we need more spiritual power. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.
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 |
A man with a surplus can control circumstances, but a man without a surplus is controlled by them, and often he has no opportunity to exercise judgment.
Circumstances | Control | Judgment | Man | Opportunity | Surplus | Wisdom |
One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
Excitement | History | Men | Play | Respect | Rule | Safe | Unique | Wisdom | Following | Respect |
Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civilization, and moral and intellectual culture, our fathers found that the divine ordinance of government, in every stage of ascent, was adjustable on principles of the common reason to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent councils of the divine wisdom, the happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and higher morality.
Authority | Capacity | Civilization | Culture | Government | Man | Mankind | Morality | People | Principles | Progress | Reason | Redemption | Security | Society | Title | 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 |
Take care of your health; you have no right to neglect it, and thus become a burden to yourself and perhaps others. Let you food be simple; never eat too much; take exercise enough; be systematic in all things; if unwell, starve yourself till you are well again, and you may throw care to the winds, and physic to the dogs.
One of the characteristics of great drawing is the artist's wholehearted acceptance of his own style and character. It is as if the drawing says for the artist, "Here I am."
Acceptance | Character | Style | Wisdom |
Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.
Age | Art | Literature | Men | Public | Science | Sound | Thinking | Tradition | Wisdom | Old |
Philip J. Hilts, fully Philip James Hilts
In all human activities, it is not ideas or machines that dominate; it is people. I have heard people speak of “the effect of personality on science.” But this is a backward thought. Rather, we should talk about he effect of science on personalities. Science is not the dispassionate analysis of impartial data. It is the human, and thus passionate, exercise of skill and sense on such date. Science is not an exercise in objectivity, but, more accurately, an exercise in which objectivity is prized.
Ideas | Machines | Objectivity | People | Personality | Science | Sense | Skill | Thought | Wisdom |
Edmund Husserl, fully Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl
Cognition is, after all, only human cognition, bound up with human intellectual forms, and unfit to reach the very nature of things, to reach things in themselves.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.