This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer to the last appeal of what is right lies within a person's own breast. Trust thyself.
Intuition | People | Right | Sense | Trust | Wisdom | Wise |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Thinking for oneself is always arduous and is sometimes painful. The temptation to stop thinking and to take dogma on faith is strong. Yet, since the intellect does possess the capacity to think for itself, it also has the impulse and feels the obligation. We may therefore feel sure that the intellect will always refuse, sooner or later, to take traditional doctrines on trust.
Capacity | Dogma | Faith | Impulse | Obligation | Temptation | Thinking | Trust | Will | Intellect | Temptation | Think |
Compared with the short span of time they live, men of great intellect are like huge buildings, standing on a small plot of ground. The size of the building cannot be seen by anyone, just in front of it; nor, for an analogous reason, can the greatness of a genius be estimated while he lives. but when a century has passed, the world recognizes it and wishes him back again.
Genius | Greatness | Men | Reason | Size | Time | Wishes | World | Intellect |
Compared with the short span of time they live, men of great intellect are like huge buildings, standing on a small plot of ground. The size of the building cannot be seen by anyone, just in front of it; nor, for an analogous reason, can the greatness of a genius be estimated while he lives. But when a century has passed, the world recognizes it and wishes him back again.
Genius | Greatness | Men | Reason | Size | Time | Wishes | World | Intellect |
Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The free intellect is the chief engine of human progress.
The great intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
Men | Originality | Intellect |
Wisdom consists in the highest use of the intellect for the discernment of the largest moral interest of humanity. It is the most perfect willingness to do the right combined with the utmost attainable knowledge of what is right… Wisdom consists in working for the better from the love of the best.
Better | Discernment | Humanity | Knowledge | Love | Right | Wisdom | Intellect |
God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
Day | Eternity | Instinct | Time | Will | Wise | Intellect | Think |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination.
Birth | Imagination | Marriage | Men | Nature | Soul | Intellect |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.
Birth | Imagination | Marriage | Nature | Soul | Intellect |
To be infatuated with the power of one’s own intellect is an accident which seldom happens but to those who are remarkable for the want of intellectual power. Whenever Nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
How wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul! The intellect of man sits enthroned visibly upon his forehead and in his eye; and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. But the soul reveals itself in the voice only, as God in “the still, small voice,” and in a voice from the burning bush. The soul of man is audible, not visible. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain, invisible to man!
Eternal | God | Heart | Man | Soul | Sound | God | Intellect |
All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought.
Ends | Intuition | Knowledge | Mind | Nothing | Reason | Sense | Thought | Understanding | Unity |