This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
Anyone who is thoroughly familiar with the language and literature of a people cannot be wholly its enemy.
Enemy | Language | Literature | People | Wisdom |
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
Human nature | Nature | Pain | Wisdom |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
If civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and knowledge which society pours into the individual at each new generation. Scratch the surface, abolish everything we owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or something very near it.
Civilization | Education | Humanity | Individual | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day. Nature is beautiful and fellowmen are dear, and duty is close beside us, and God is over us and in us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at last to come to that high life where we shall be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known unto God”; for that, and that alone, is peace.
Day | Duty | God | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Peace | Prayer | Supplication | Trust | Wisdom | God |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.
Art | Cause | Effort | Ideas | Man | Nature | Power | Wisdom |
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Age | Enough | Family | Father | Isolation | Mother | Nature | People | Security | Wisdom | World |
We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.
Karl Bühler, fully Karl Ludwig Bühler
By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely.
Age | Body | Control | Education | Knowledge | Language | Memory | Time | Wisdom | Words | Work | Child |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Art does not imitate nature, but founds itself on the study of nature - takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, vis.: the mind and soul of man.
Art | Intention | Man | Mind | Nature | Soul | Study | Wisdom |
Love means that the adults be genuinely concerned with the evolution of the true nature of the child. Children are not able to respond to a love which tries to fashion them according to the concept of the adult, no matter how good the latter's intention may be.
Children | Evolution | Good | Intention | Love | Means | Nature | Wisdom |
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
Keep the middle path of strength and virtue, lest you be overwhelmed by misfortune or corrupted by pleasant fortune. All that falls short or goes too far ahead, has contempt for happiness, and gains not the reward for labor done. It rests in your own hands what shall be the nature of the fortune which you choose to form for yourself. For all fortune which seems difficult, either exercises virtue, or corrects or punishes vice.
Contempt | Fortune | Labor | Misfortune | Nature | Reward | Strength | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Misfortune |