This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others.
Religious addiction is using God, the Church, or a belief system as an escape from reality, in an attempt to find or elevate a sense of self-worth or well-being... It is the ultimate form of co-dependency - feeling worthless in and of ourselves and looking outside for something or someone to tell us we are worthwhile... Recovery means discovering divinity in one's own life.
Addiction | Belief | Church | Divinity | God | Life | Life | Means | Reality | Self | Self-worth | Sense | System | Wisdom | Worth |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for some experience of life and man. But all this grumbling is a vile thing.
Books | Experience | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Wisdom |
The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it - to realize it to the full - to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.
Life | Life | Mystery | Understanding | Wisdom |
Karl Bühler, fully Karl Ludwig Bühler
By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely.
Age | Body | Control | Education | Knowledge | Language | Memory | Time | Wisdom | Words | Work | Child |
Love means that the adults be genuinely concerned with the evolution of the true nature of the child. Children are not able to respond to a love which tries to fashion them according to the concept of the adult, no matter how good the latter's intention may be.
Children | Evolution | Good | Intention | Love | Means | Nature | Wisdom |
Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.
Knowledge | Principles | Wisdom |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
All the knowledge that we mortals can acquire is not knowledge positive, but knowledge comparative, and subject to the errors and passions of humanity.
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
Providence is the very divine reason which arranges all things, and rests with the supreme disposer of all; while fate is that ordering which is a part of all changeable things, and by means of which Providence binds all things together in their own order. Providence embraces all things equally, however different they may be, even however infinite: when they are assigned to their own places, forms, and times, Fate sets them in an orderly motion; so that this development of the temporal order, unified in the intelligence of the mind of God, is Providence. The working of this unified development in time is called Fate. These are different, but the one hangs upon the other. For this order, which is ruled by Fate, emanates from the directness of Providence.
Fate | God | Intelligence | Means | Mind | Order | Providence | Reason | Time | Wisdom | Fate |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.
Benevolence | Fraud | Good | Knowledge | Little | Mankind | Wisdom | World | Friendship | Forgive | Learn |
The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.
The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things - that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from that which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only to protection to His realm.
Dignity | Discovery | Duty | Experience | God | Humility | Liberty | Life | Life | Obligation | Repentance | Sacrifice | Sorrow | Teach | Truth | Will | Wisdom | God |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
Democracy | Government | Means | Wisdom | Government |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom - from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?
Fate | Heaven | Ignorance | Knowledge | Order | Wisdom | Fate |