This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.
Didst thou every descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment of time? Didst thou ever see a bright infinite in the narrow point of an object? Then thou knowest what spirit means - the spire-top, whither all things ascend harmoniously, where they meet and sit contented in an unfathomed Depth of Life.
Character | Eternity | Life | Life | Means | Object | Spirit | Time |
No perfect thing is too small for eternal recollection.
Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
It is a secret known but to few, yet of no small use in the conduct of life, that when you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.
Character | Conduct | Conversation | Inclination | Life | Life | Man |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
Do you remember how small grains of sand are? Yet if enough are placed in a ship, they sink it.
Averroes, full name ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd NULL
A simple-minded believer would say, ‘God is in Heaven.’ A man of trained mind, knowing that God must be represented as a physical entity in space, would say, ‘God is everywhere, and not merely in Heaven.’ But if the omnipresence of God be taken only in a physical and spatial sense, that formula, too, is likely in error. Accordingly, the philosopher more adequately expresses the purely spiritual nature of God when he asserts that God is nowhere but in Himself; in fact, rather than say that God is in spaced he might more justly say that space and matter are in God.
Error | God | Heaven | Knowing | Man | Mind | Nature | Omnipresence | Sense | Space | Wisdom | God |
Alain Pen name of Emile-Auguste Chartier
It is a small thing to accept people for what they are; if we really love them we must want them to be what they are.
The general conclusion is that all the objects of science, including minds and goods, are things occurring in space and time... and that we can study them in virtue of the fact that we come into spatial and temporal relations with them. And therefore all ideals, ultimates, symbols, agencies and the like are to be rejected, and no such distinction as that of facts and principles, or facts and values, can be maintained. There are only facts, i.e., occurrences in space and time.
Distinction | Ideals | Principles | Science | Space | Study | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
Mankind is a creature of space, a space race living on a planet in orbit around a star, as others are also doing. Mankind is not unique, as he fondly imagines. He is merely a part of the vast interstellar human family bred and nurtured by us through the eons of time on planets in different solar systems throughout the galaxy.