This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Kate Millet, Katherine Murray Millett
The care of children. . . is infinitely better left to the best-trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation, rather than to harried and all too frequently unhappy persons with little time or taste for the work of educating minds.
Kenneth Eble, fully Kenneth Eugene Eble
Whether [teaching] contexts come from richness of experience, a restless curiosity, opportunities for leisure and study, or from an education aimed at breadth, they are necessities for affecting the learning of diverse students.
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
All of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity.
Obligation | Public | Taste | Tears |
A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
Children who are struggling present a range of issues from severe breakdowns in learning to the frustrations of those whose efforts in school far exceed their achievements. Some have brains that are wired to handle a lot of information at once. Others can only absorb and process a little information at a time. Still others must look at information many times before grasping it. Some kids' brains can recall information and skills rapidly, while others need more time to process and respond to a stimulus.
Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
Success is a vitamin that every kid must take in order to thrive during his or her school years. We, as teachers and parents, must make sure that this critical learning "supplement" is available to all students. All Kinds of Minds believes that embracing the unique set of ideas and practices that follow will increase our odds of succeeding at this essential task.
Lewis Carroll, pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Danger | Harmony | Joy | Laughter | Learning | Spirit | Danger |
I always thought it was a question of achieving some permanent state of tranquillity ... but it's not. It's more like learning to surf. The waves keep rolling in, each different from the last, and you have to ride them, instead of getting pounded to bits.
Learning | Question | Thought | Tranquility | Thought |
Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
Yet these types of responses to children with learning differences are all too common. The fact is that these kids often have good minds with real and obvious intellectual strengths. However, they suffer from what is often subtle dysfunction - patterns of brain wiring that makes certain aspects of learning exceedingly difficult. These children are highly vulnerable - and they're slipping through the cracks.
Weak men often from the very principle of their weakness derive a certain susceptibility; delicacy and taste which render them, in those particulars, much superior to men of stronger and more consistent minds, who laugh at them.
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked.
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Human learning has often been an instrument, not a source, of hostility to religion.
Learning |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
Learning |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
You aren't learning anything when you're talking.
Learning |
I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this because it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never know until it's too late to do anything about it, how sweet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it for them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given. Every day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.
Bitterness | Day | Effort | Hate | Learning | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Parents | People | Teach | Thinking | Will | World | Understand |