This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.
Education | Fear | Improvement | Wisdom |
Maurice Duhamel, pen name of Maurice Bourgeaux
An Arab folk tale relates that Pestilence once met a caravan upon the desert way to Baghdad. "Why," asked the Arab chief, "must you hasten to Baghdad?" "To take five thousand lives." Pestilence replied. Upon the way back to the City of the Caliphs, Pestilence and the caravan met again. "You deceived me," the chief said angrily. "instead of five thousand lives you took fifty thousand." "Nay," said Pestilence. "Five thousand and not one more. It was Fear who killed the rest."
How extraordinary is the situation of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without going deeper than our daily life, it is plain we exist for our fellow men, in the first place for those upon whose smiles and welfare our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally but to whose destinies we are bound by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.
Day | Life | Life | Men | Order | Sympathy | Wisdom | Happiness |
Fred Dretske, fully Frederick "Fred" Irwin Dretske
In the beginning there was information. The word came later. the transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.
Fear builds prison walls around a man and bars him in with dreads, anxieties and timid doubts. Faith is the great liberator from prison walls. Fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages, fear sickens, faith heals; fear puts hopelessness at the heart of life, while faith sees beyond the horizon and rejoices in its God.
Faith | Fear | God | Heart | Life | Life | Man | Prison | Wisdom |
The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.
Education | Fear | Improvement | Wisdom |
Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell
Most people like praise. Many people have an unreasonable fear of administering it; it is part of the puritanical dislike for anything that is agreeable - to others. When it is really deserved, most people expand under it into richer and better selves.
No earthly purpose satisfies man’s longing to find his eternal reason for being... Man seeks incessantly for the meaning of life until he discovers the single eternal purpose for his existence. That purpose is the same for every man and woman. God created us because He longs to enter into fellowship with us. We belong to Him by right of creation. We can never know order and harmony in this life until we choose to establish a right relationship with God... Our search for meaning to life will end only when we establish that personal relationship with God and begin our walk with Him - for time and for eternity. Then comes that glorious personal fulfillment described in holy writ as the “peace that passes all understanding.”
Eternal | Eternity | Existence | Fulfillment | God | Harmony | Life | Life | Longing | Man | Meaning | Order | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Relationship | Right | Search | Time | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Woman | God |
Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people’s peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.
Anarchy | Government | Intelligence | Nothing | Order | Peace | People | Rights | Wisdom | Government |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
I believe that we are conforming to the divine order and the will of Providence when we are doing even indifferent things that belong to our condition.
Order | Providence | Will | Wisdom |
One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"
Better | Change | Children | Difficulty | Example | Learning | Little | Order | Perception | Society | Suspicion | Will | Wisdom | Society | Trouble | Child |
Martha Gellhorn, fully Martha Ellis Gellhorn
By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.