This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he seldom has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.
Contemplation | Life | Life | Prayer | Contemplation |
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.
Experiment | Past | Sacred |
Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities... There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand that this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
Behavior | Birth | Culture | Custom | Experience | History | Individual | Life | Life | Little | Time | Understand |
One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own. A greater vividness and permanency of impression is secured, and facts thus acquired become registered in the mind in a way that mere imparted information can never produce.
Impression | Knowledge | Labor | Mind | Property |
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
What is reality? The simple picture before your eyes. Your emotional reaction, however, is based entirely on the way you personally perceived the situation... Facts themselves are neutral. You do not have emotional reactions to facts. Your emotional reaction is always based on your subjective evaluation of any situation... Learn to differentiate between facts, inferences, and value judgments. Facts do not make you happy or sad. It is only your value judgments that do.
I am more fond of achieving than striving. My theories must prove to be facts or be discarded as worthless. My efforts must soon be crowned with success, or discontinued.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great works springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.
Aspiration | Life | Life | Men | Nature | Reason | Thought | World | Aspiration | Thought |
When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.
Mind |
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.
Abstract | Feelings | Mistake | Object | Psychoanalysis | Reality | Society | Society |