This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or for intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement without hostility or drama, and therefore all the more deadly.
Great intellectual gifts mean an activity pre-eminently nervous in its character, and consequently a very high degree of susceptibility to pain in every form.
A person who does not know how to use his mind productively will flee from the state of being alone. But when a person has leaned to think, he will greatly appreciate the moments when he is by himself, for then he will be able to utilize those moments for intellectual and spiritual growth. In fact, moments of solitude serve as tests to a person to clarify how thinking-oriented he really is.
You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature.
Judgment |
The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
Will |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Lifelong part-time education is the surest way of raising the intellectual and moral level of the masses.
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy fro the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love.
Assertion | Esteem | Existence | Joy | Love | Self | Self-esteem | Happiness |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The more purely intellectual aim of education should be the endeavor to make us see and imagine the world in an objective manner as far as possible as it really is in itself, and not merely through the distorting medium of personal desires.
It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers assumed by others.
Conversation is the music of the mind, an intellectual orchestra, where all the instruments should bear a part, but where none should play together. Each of the performers should have a just appreciation of his own powers, otherwise an unskillful novice who might usurp the first fiddle, would infallibly get into a scrape. To prevent these mistakes, a good master of the band will be very particular in the assortment of the performers; if too dissimilar, there will be no harmony, if too few, there will be no variety; and, if too numerous, there will be no order, for the presumption of one prater, might silence the eloquence of a Burke, or the wit of a Sheridan, as a single kettle-drum would drown the finest solo of a Gionowich or a Jordini.
Appreciation | Conversation | Good | Harmony | Mind | Music | Order | Play | Presumption | Silence | Will | Wit | Appreciation |
Scratch an intellectual and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.
Sound |
The purpose of human life is to achieve our own spiritual evolution, to get rid of negativity, to establish harmony among our physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual quadrants, to learn to live in harmony within the family, community, nation, the whole world and all living things, treating all of mankind as brothers and sisters - thus making it finally possible to have peace on earth.
Earth | Evolution | Family | Harmony | Life | Life | Mankind | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | World | Learn |
I have no sympathy with the old idea that children owe such immense gratitude to their parents that they can never fulfill their obligations to them. I think the obligation is all on the other side. Parents can never do too much for their children to repay them for the injustice of having brought them into the world, unless they have insured them high moral and intellectual gifts, fine physical health, and enough money and education to render life something more than one careless struggle for necessaries.
Children | Education | Enough | Gratitude | Health | Injustice | Injustice | Life | Life | Money | Obligation | Parents | Struggle | Sympathy | World | Old | Think |
During [these] periods of relation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight.
Friendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking or comradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moral appreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and to produce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting, friendship does not arise.
Appreciation | Enough | Instinct | Sympathy | Friendship | Appreciation |