This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do.
Abstract | Common Sense | Difficulty | Discussion | Duty | Imagination | Pacifism | Rationality | Reason | Sense | Utopia | Think |
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
The conqueror is regarded with awe the wise man commands our respect but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.
Better | Conduct | Consideration | Family | Father | Improvement | Justice | Justify | Life | Life | Lying | Magic | Man | Sense | Truth | Understanding | Will | Work | Worth | Vice |
It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
Consciousness | Perception | Psychology | Sense |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
To view attention as a special state of intelligence, and to distinguish it from consciousness, is utterly inept.
Hypothesis | Opposition | Practice | Sense | Theoretical |
But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless someday bring about.
Conversation | Criticism | Meaning | Power | Prayer | Sense | Soul |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
This [faculty], to which I give the name of the “elaborative faculty,â€â€”the faculty of relations or comparisons,—constitutes what is properly denominated thought.
Knowledge | Language | Perception | Sense |
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
Belief | Excitement | Good | Need | Nothing | Right | Sense | Wrong | Understand |
The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
Sense |
There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.
Reformation If it be the earnest desire and longing of your heart to be merciful as He is merciful; to be full of His unwearied patience, to dwell in His unalterable meekness; if you long to be like Him in universal, impartial love; if you desire to communicate every good to every creature that you are able; if you love and practice everything that is good, righteous, and lovely for its own sake, because it is good, righteous, and lovely; and resist no evil but with goodness; then you have the utmost certainty that the Spirit of God dwells and governs in you.
If it is our glory and happiness to have a rational nature, that is endued with wisdom and reason, that is capable of imitating the divine nature, then it must be our glory and happiness to improve our reason and wisdom, to act up to the excellency of our rational nature, and to imitate God in all our actions, to the utmost of our power.
The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity, unless one has been through the experience one's self.
Belief | Change | Passion | Peace | Salvation | Sense | Will | Loss |
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can… in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life… The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Common Sense | Fighting | Sense | Will | World |