This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A prudent person profits from personal experience, a wise one from the experience of others.
Experience | Wisdom | Wise |
The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.
Experience | Individual | Language | Plan | Wisdom |
"Faith is tendency toward action." According to such a view, faith is the matrix of formulated creeds and the inspiration of endeavor... Faith in its newer sense signifies that experience itself is the sole ultimate authority.
Action | Authority | Experience | Faith | Inspiration | Sense | Wisdom |
The sure foundations of the State are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue’s sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.
Culture | Degeneracy | Education | Experience | Ignorance | Knowledge | Learning | Liberty | Mankind | Wisdom |
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder, and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed... To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.
Art | Awe | Beauty | Experience | Good | Knowledge | Men | Science | Sense | Wisdom | Wonder | Art | Beauty |
Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen
There is no force so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.
Experience | Fear | Mystery | Religion | Wisdom |
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation.
Experience | Wisdom | Wise |
It's an old adage that the way to be safe is never to be secure... Each one of us requires the spur of insecurity to force us to do our best.
Force | Insecurity | Safe | Wisdom | Old |
The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
Experience | Force | Research | Wisdom |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Courage | Defiance | Force | Foresight | Love | Self | Self-denial | Selfishness | Submission | Wisdom |
We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition.
Aspiration | Events | Force | Imagination | Intelligence | Life | Life | Meaning | Philosophy | Poetry | Practice | Revelation | Science | Will | Wisdom | Circumstance |