This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
Children | Death | Grave | Harmony | Ideas | Life | Life | Nature | Unity | Will | Blessed | Learn |
Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming... We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths.
Protection against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
Conduct | Dissent | Enough | Ideas | Means | Opinion | Society | Tyranny | Society |
[Economic] and social changes, though among the greatest, are not the only forces which shape the course of our species. Ideas are not always the mere signs and effects of social circumstances: they are themselves a power in history.
Circumstances | History | Ideas | Power |
The macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideas and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be of the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated.
Ideas | Individual | Nature | Order | Principles | Reason | Society | Solitude | Universe |
To the liberal ideas of the age must be opposed the moral ideas of all ages.
There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.
Education takes place in the whole community. It is in the malls, the highways, the media, and their parents’ lifestyles that give young people their clearest ideas of what reality is about
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretive both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.
Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
Better | Ideas | Organization | Right | Time | Will | Work |
Reason and emotion are not antagonists. What seems like a struggle is a struggle between two opposing ideas or values, one of which, automatic and unconscious, manifests itself in the form of a feeling.
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
Better | Competition | Conduct | Fighting | Good | Ideas | Men | Power | Thought | Time | Truth | Wishes | Thought |
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
Better | Competition | Good | Ideas | Power | Thought | Truth | Thought |
Ideals are ideas or beliefs when these are objects not only of contemplation or affirmation but also of hope, desire, endeavor, admiration and resolve.
Admiration | Contemplation | Desire | Hope | Ideals | Ideas | Contemplation |
A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.
Duty | Ideas | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Thought | Understanding |
He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty.
Duty | Ideas | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Opinion | Thought | Understanding |