This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The hasty appeal to the supernatural is a couch upon which the intellect slothfully reclines.
Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit. How sad it would be, I thought, if we humans ultimately were to lose all sense of mystery, all sense of awe, if our left brains were utterly to dominate the right so that logic and reason triumphed over intuition and alienated us absolutely from our innermost being, from our hearts, from our souls.
Awe | Intuition | Logic | Mystery | Reason | Right | Science | Sense | Spirit | Thought |
Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, and the conquests made form the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.
Day | Destiny | Energy | Foresight | Guidance | Life | Life | Mankind | Means | Nature | Property | Guidance | Intellect |
The most incessant occupation of the human intellect throughout life is the ascertainment of truth.
Life | Life | Occupation | Truth | Intellect |
Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
Logic, which alone can give certainty, is the instrument of demonstration; intuition is the instrument of invention.
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Just as iron rusts from disuses… so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.
Mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. For all the symbolic narratives, images, rites, and festivals by which life within the cultural monad is controlled and defined are of the order of the way of art. Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produced them.
Adolescence | Age | Art | Birth | Childhood | Control | Death | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Old age | Order | Rites | System | Time | World | Intellect | Old |
Maxims are to the intellect what laws are to actions; they do not enlighten, but they guide and direct, and, although themselves blind, are protective.
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
It is through the intellect that the human being has the capacity of honoring God.
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
The intellect which emanates from God to us is the link that joins us to God. You have it in your power either to strengthen or weaken that bond. It will become strong only when you make use of it in a spirit of love for God; it will be weakened when you direct your thoughts to other things.
Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
The intellect in every one of us is God.
In what respect are we superior to brute creation, if intellect is not allowed to be the guide of passion? Brutes hope and fear, love and hate; but, without a capacity to improve, a power of turning these passions to good or evil, they neither acquire virtue nor wisdom. - Why? Because the Creator has not given them reason.
Capacity | Evil | Fear | Good | Hate | Hope | Love | Passion | Power | Reason | Respect | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Respect | Intellect |
Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it.
Earnestness | Knowing | Knowledge | Light | Intellect |
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.
Action | God | Good | Heart | Insight | Intuition | Justice | Man | Perfection | Purity | Sentiment | Soul | Space | Time |
Most men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are must luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience have been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.