This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Tom Hayden, fully Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden
It takes a certain kind of bravery and a certain kind of goodness to be able to not just put your destructive past behind you, but to continue to take harassment from society and from police for your past.
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
Energy | Life | Life | Philosophy | Science | Sense | System | Teach |
Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett
And hearts resolved and hands prepared the blessings they enjoy to guard.
Science |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that question is: 'Who knows how to make love stay?'
Art | Enough | Land | Magic | Pleasure | Present | Religion | Science | Time | Art |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Many people have chosen psychotherapy over enlightenment. Someone asked Anagarike Munindra, a great Buddhist meditation master in India, why it was easier for Asians to attain enlightenment. His reply was that, "Westerners are doing psychotherapy."
Science |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
The legal brocard, “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,†is a rule not more applicable to other witnesses than to consciousness.
Science |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Hardly is there a similarity detected between two or three facts, than men hasten to extend it to all others.
I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
Absurd | Cause | Motives | Nations | Peace | Refinement | Science | War | Will |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Sentiment, as here and elsewhere employed by Dr. Reid in the meaning of opinion (sententia), is not to be imitated.
Science |
Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.
Science |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Power is, therefore, a word which we may use both in an active and in a passive signification; and in psychology we may apply it both to the active faculty and to the passive capacity of the mind.
Absolute | Ends | Indifference | Knowledge | Reason | Science | Truths |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
In the Platonic sense, ideas were the patterns according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world.
Distinction | Knowledge | Object | Philosophy | Science | Thinking |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.
Metaphysics | Science |
Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
Absolute | Body | Conscience | Consciousness | Education | Energy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Meaning | Miracles | Present | Religion | Science | World | God | Think |
The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity... It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 flight to Oslo?