This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Great ability without discretion comes almost invariably to a tragic end.
Ability | Discretion | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Belief | Childhood | Control | Evolution | Experience | Human race | Individual | Man | Means | Obedience | Race | Religion | Society | Trust | Wisdom | World | Society |
Howard Gardner, fully Howard Earl Gardner
Young children possess the ability to cut across the customary categories; to appreciate usually undiscerned links among realms, to respond effectively in a parallel manner to events which are usually categorized differently, and to capture these original conceptions in words.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the function of the imagination.
Ability | Cowardice | Imagination | Panic | Wisdom |
Harry Golden, born Herschel Goldhirsch
The school is a place or institution for teaching and learning. Underneath this definition in every standard dictionary is another definition: School is a large number of fish of the same kind swimming together in the same direction.
Whenever I hear people talking about "liberal ideas," I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.
Emotions | Ends | Ideas | Love | Men | Mission | People | Talking | Wisdom |
Pope Leo I, aka Pope Leo The Great, Pope Saint Leo I NULL
Peace is the first thing the angels sang. Peace is the mark of the sons of God. Peace is the nurse of love. Peace is the mother of unity. Peace is the rest of blessed souls. Peace is the dwelling place of eternity.
Angels | Eternity | God | Love | Mother | Peace | Rest | Unity | Wisdom | Blessed |
God makes the Aeon, the Aeon makes the Kosmos, the Kosmos makes Time, and Time makes Coming-to-be. The essence of God is the Good, the essence of the Aeon is sameness, the essence of the Kosmos is order, the essence of Time is change, and the essence of Coming-to-be is life. The workings of God are mind and soul, the workings of the Aeon are immortality and duration, the workings of the Aeon are immortality and duration, the workings of the kosmos are re-instatement in identity and re-instatement by substitution, the workings of Time are increase and decrease, and the workings of Coming-to-be are quality and quantity. The aeon then is in God, the Kosmos is in the Aeon, Time is in the Kosmos, and Coming-to-be takes place in Time.
Change | God | Good | Immortality | Life | Life | Mind | Order | Soul | Time | Wisdom | God |
Imagination, whatever may be said to the contrary, will always hold a place in history, as truth does in romance. Has not romance been penned with history in view?
As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder.
Age | Beauty | Children | Conformity | Curiosity | Experience | Hunger | Need | Science | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Beauty | Value |
Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
I grew up with the idea that democracy is not something you believe in, or a place you hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and falls apart.
Whatever therefore is consequent to a tie of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such a condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Culture | Danger | Death | Earth | Enemy | Fear | Force | Industry | Invention | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Men | Security | Society | Strength | Time | War | Wisdom | Danger |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents... It is a place where the city of man services not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
Beauty | Body | Commerce | Desire | Goals | Hunger | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Society | Wisdom | Society | Commerce | Beauty | Child |
The wild is a place to be tamed. It is an arrogant designation of priority - make the world over for humans. Americans, seeing landscape from the beginning as real estate, are scrupulous about dealing in it, and in prosperous areas all over the country, a fierce moral judgment falls on “waste” places, scrubland, even the vacant lots in developments, where the ragweed’s got a good hold. For God’s sake, do something with it! everybody says.
Beginning | God | Good | Judgment | Waste | Wisdom | World |