This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
We know that we are not limited by the accident of our birth or the timing of it, and we recognize the truth that we have always been around. We can reinhabit time and own our story as a species. We were present back there in the fireball and the rains that streamed down on this still molten planet, and in the primordial seas. We remember that in our mother’s womb, where we wear vestigial gills and tail and fins for hands. We remember that. That information is in us and there is a deep, deep kinship in us, beneath the outer layers of our neocortex or what we learned in school. There is a deep wisdom, a bondedness with our creation, and an ingenuity far beyond what we think we have. And when we expand our notions of what we are to include this story, we will have a wonderful time and we will survive.
Accident | Birth | Ingenuity | Mother | Present | Story | Time | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Ingenuity | Think |
If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.
Present | Television | Wisdom |
Our problem is that once we have accepted an irreducible distinction between mental and physical facts and properties, and have allowed that physical facts and properties constitute sufficient causes of actions, we seem to be forced to admit that mental facts and properties are epiphenomenal, causally idle; yet this conclusion is itself implausible.
Distinction | Wisdom |
Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good; and we are then possessed of any good, when we have it so in our power that we can use it when we please... Sorrow is uneasiness in the mind, upon the thought of a good lost, which might have been enjoyed longer; or the sense of a present evil.
Consideration | Evil | Good | Joy | Mind | Power | Present | Sense | Sorrow | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
John "J. M. E." McTaggart. born John McTaggart Ellis
Past, present and future are incompatible determinations. Every event must be one or the other, but no event can be more than one. If I say that any event is past, that implies that it is neither present nor future, and so with the others. And this exclusiveness is essential to change, and therefore to time. For the only change we can get is from future to present, and from present to past. The characteristics, therefore, are incompatible. But every event has them all. If M is past, it has been present and future. If it is future, it will be present and past. If it is present, it has been future and will be past. thus all the three characteristics belong to each event. How is this consistent with their being incompatible?
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Not in theory, but in truth, the best and most excellent government for each nation is the one under which it has preserved its existence. Its form and essential fitness depend on habit. We are prone to be discontented with the present state of things. But I maintain, nevertheless, that to wish for the government of a few in a democratic state, or another type of government in a monarchy, is foolish and wrong.
Existence | Government | Habit | Present | Truth | Wisdom | Wrong | Government |
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
Luxury is... absolutely necessary in monarchies; as it is also in despotic states. In the former, it is the use of liberty; in the latter, it is the abuse of servitude. A slave appointed by his master to tyrannize over other wretches of the same condition, uncertain of enjoying tomorrow the blessings of today, has no other felicity that that of glutting the pride, the passions, and the voluptuousness of the present moment.
Abuse | Blessings | Liberty | Luxury | Present | Pride | Servitude | Tomorrow | Wisdom |
God is outside of none, present unperceived to all; we break away from Him, or rather from ourselves; what we turn from we cannot reach; astray ourselves, we cannot go in search of another; a child distraught will not recognize its father; to find ourselves is to know our source.
Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival
All destiny begins with thinking. Responsibilities connected with the present duty. Duty of which leads to the balancing of the thought. One of the objects of life is to think without creating thoughts. That is without being attached to the object for which the thought is created and can be attained only when desire is self-controlled and directed by thinking. Until then, thoughts are created and are destiny.
Desire | Destiny | Duty | Life | Life | Object | Present | Self | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Think | Thought |
At present we can only reason of the divine justice form what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes, we may have truer and nobler ideas of it; but while we are in this life, we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us.
Ideas | Justice | Life | Life | Man | Present | Reason | Wisdom |
If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.
I do not evolve, I am. In art there is neither past nor future. Art that is not in the present will never be.
I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers, they are gossips.
Fallacy | Ideas | Mind | Mistake | People | Thinkers | Wisdom | Afraid |
We are here because in this part of the universe time is trained to stop... Life cannot survive in time that flows, or while it flows. Life survives only when time stands still... So it could happen someplace, somehow, that eternity and time would meet at a golden intersection. At the very heart of the cross, where eternity and time would connect, time would stop to be blessed by eternity. And that, in fact, is our present. Consequently, the present is the very portion of time that has stopped. Life survives only in the present. The past, therefore, consists of moments during which time has previously stopped; the future, of moments during which time will subsequently stop. So here we are. We are here because in this part of the universe time stops and makes life possible. Perhaps we can imagine a time that is not lined up to intersect eternity, a time that would seem sterile to our way of thinking. In such a region of the universe, we would not be in a position to exist since our dominant features are those of life and death.
Death | Eternity | Future | Heart | Life | Life | Past | Position | Present | Thinking | Time | Universe | Will | Wisdom | Blessed |