This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The truth of not-knowing is the only factor from which one can move. The truth of that is stable. A mind that does not know is in a state of learning. The moment I say I have learned, I have stopped learning and that stopping is the stability of division.
Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL
"Every fault of the mind becomes more conspicuous and more guilty in proportion to the rank of the offender" - Persons in high station are not only answerable for their own conduct, but for the example they may hold out to others. This, joined to their advantages of education, aggravates their vices and loads them with a greater share of responsibility.
Character | Conduct | Education | Example | Fault | Mind | Rank | Responsibility | Fault | Guilty |
Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL
We deem those happy who, from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills, without being overcome by them. A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
Character | Childhood | Evil | Experience | Father | Good | Happy | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Promise | World | Youth | Child | Think |
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as to a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.
Action | Character | God | Mind | Truth | Understanding | Wishes | God | Understand |
Reality comes into being only when the mind is still, not made still. Therefore, there must be no disciplining of the mind to be still. When you discipline yourself, it is merely a projected desire to be in a particular state. Such a state is not the state of passivity... Liberation is from moment to moment in the understanding of what is, when the mind is free, not made free. It is only a free mind that can discover, not a mind molded by a belief or shaped according to a hypothesis. Such a mind cannot discover. There can be no freedom is there is conflict, for conflict is the fixing of the self in relationship.
Belief | Character | Desire | Discipline | Freedom | Hypothesis | Mind | Reality | Relationship | Self | Understanding |
John L. Lewis, fully John Llewellyn Lewis
Often those who seek only license for their plundering, cry “liberty.” In the guise of this Old American ideal, men of vast economic domain would destroy what little liberty remains to those who toil. The liberty we seek is different. It is liberty fro common people - freedom from economic bondage, freedom from the oppressions of the vast bureaucracies of great corporations; freedom to regain again some human initiative, freedom that arises from economic security and human self-respect.
Character | Destroy | Freedom | Initiative | Liberty | Little | Men | People | Respect | Security | Self | Old |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
It is a true observation of ancient writers, that as men are apt to be cast down by adversity, so they are easily satiated with prosperity, and that joy and grief produce the same effects. For whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight they fight from ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
Adversity | Ambition | Character | Grief | Joy | Men | Necessity | Observation | Passion | Prosperity |
It is not true that a man can believe or disbelieve what he will. But it is certain that an active desire to find any proposition true will unconsciously tend to that result, by dismissing importunate suggestions which run counter to the belief, and welcoming those which favor it. The psychological law, that we only see what interests us, and only assimilate what is adapted to our condition, causes the mind to select its evidence.
Belief | Character | Desire | Evidence | Law | Man | Mind | Will |
He who always seeks more light the more he finds, and finds more the more he seeks, is one of the few happy mortals who take and give in every point of time. The tide and ebb of giving and receiving is the sum of human happiness, which he alone enjoys who always wishes to acquire new knowledge, and always finds it.
Character | Giving | Happy | Knowledge | Light | Time | Wishes |
What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the whole human race... Education gives man nothing which he could not also get from within himself; it gives him that which he could get form within himself, only quicker and more easily. In the same way too, revelation gives nothing to the human race which reason could not arrive at on its own; only it has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things sooner.
Character | Education | Human race | Important | Individual | Man | Nothing | Race | Reason | Revelation |