This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
Compensation | Example | Freedom of speech | Freedom of thought | Freedom | People | Speech | Thought | Wisdom |
Experience: in that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external or sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.
Experience | Knowledge | Observation | Thinking | Wisdom |
No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty - none less inclined to take, or touch, ought which they have not honestly earned.
I love a serious preacher, who speaks for my sake and not for his own; who seeks my salvation, and not his own vainglory. He best deserves to be heard who uses speech only to clothe his thoughts, and his thoughts only to promote truth and virtue. Nothing is more detestable than a professed declaimer, who retails his discourses as a quack does his medicine.
Love | Nothing | Salvation | Speech | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of mind is irreparable.
The pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of the child, and liberty is activity... Discipline must come through liberty.
Discipline | Liberty | Method | Observation | Wisdom |
The world of silence without speech is the world before creation, the world of unfinished creation. In silenced truth is passive and slumbering, but in language it is wide-awake. Silence is fulfilled only when speech comes forth from silence and gives it meaning and honor.
Honor | Language | Meaning | Silence | Speech | Truth | Wisdom | World |
The direct speech of feeling is allegorical and cannot be replaced by anything.
To tell the truth, however, family and poverty have done more to support me than I have to support them. They have compelled me to make exertions that I hardly thought myself capable of; and often when on the eve of despairing, they have forced me, like a coward in a corner, to fight like a hero, not for myself, but for my wife and little ones.
Family | Hero | Little | Poverty | Thought | Truth | Wife | Wisdom | Thought |
Silence is the highest wisdom of a fool as speech is the greatest trial of a wise man. If thou wouldst be known as wise, let thy words show thee so; if thou doubt thy words, let thy silence feign thee so. It is not a greater point of wisdom to discover knowledge than to hide ignorance.
Doubt | Ignorance | Knowledge | Man | Silence | Speech | Wisdom | Wise | Words | Trial |
In the faculty of speech man excels the brute; but if thou utterest what is improper, the brute is thy superior.
It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by successive generations of men, the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up and growing at length into a mighty pyramid.
Art | Business | Experience | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Men | Observation | Science | Success | Wisdom |