This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Philosophy abounds more than philosophers, and learning more than learned men.
Learning | Men | Philosophy | Wisdom |
Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish water-proof to new ideas.
Ability | Curiosity | Humility | Ideas | Ignorance | Learning | Mind | Wisdom |
People sometimes refer to higher education as the higher learning, but colleges and universities are much more than the knowledge factories; they are testaments to man's perennial struggle to make a better world for himself, his children, and his children's children. This, indeed, is their sovereign purpose. They are great fortifications against ignorance and irrationality; but they are more than places of higher learning - they are centers and symbols of man's higher yearning.
Better | Children | Education | Ignorance | Knowledge | Learning | Man | People | Purpose | Purpose | Struggle | Wisdom | World |
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether this happens at twenty or at eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly more valuable, regardless of physical capacity.
Money, after all, is extremely simple. It is a part of our transportation system. It is a simple and direct method of conveying goods from one person to another. Money is in itself most admirable. It is essential. It is not intrinsically evil. It is one of the most useful devices in social life, and when it does what it was intended to do, it is all help and no hindrance.
We must expect to fail, but fail in a learning posture, determined not to repeat the mistakes, and to maximize the benefits from what is learned in the process.
One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"
Better | Change | Children | Difficulty | Example | Learning | Little | Order | Perception | Society | Suspicion | Will | Wisdom | Society | Trouble | Child |
Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is most thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.
Howard Gardner, fully Howard Earl Gardner
For many children, the start of formal musical instruction marks the beginning of the end of musical development. The atomistic focus in most musical instruction - the individual pitch, its name, its notation -- and the measure-by-measure method of instruction and analysis run counter to the holistic way most children have come to think of, react to, and live with music.
Beginning | Children | Focus | Individual | Method | Music | Wisdom | Instruction | Think |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.
Caution | Enjoyment | Life | Life | Means | Method | Need | Punishment | Wisdom |
Ulysses S. Grant, fully Ulysses Simpson Grant, born Hiram Ulysses Grant
Laws are to govern all alike - those opposed as well as those who favor them. I know of no method to repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
Amongst all things, knowledge is truly the best thing: from its not being liable ever to be stolen, from its not being purchasable, and from its being imperishable...Learning is superior to beauty; learning is better than hidden treasure; learning is a companion on a journey to a strange country; learning is strength inexhaustible.
Beauty | Better | Journey | Knowledge | Learning | Strength | Wisdom |