This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Exact observation does not begin with modern science. For ages, it has always been essential for survival among, for example, hunters and craftsmen of many sorts. What is distinctive of modern science is the conjuncture of exact observation and exact verbalization: exactly worded descriptions of carefully observed complex objects and processes. The availability of carefully made, technical prints implemented such exactly worded descriptions.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
As contemplation [of a work of art or literature] enters upon a more serious stage, the human being is driven by the whole economy of what it is to be man to find opposite himself, in that which he contemplates, a person capable of reacting in turn. This drive is primordial and will not be denied.
Art | Commerce | Education | Individual | Life | Life | Need | Problems | Property | Technology | World | Commerce | Art |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
Absurd | Balance | Change | Education | Fault | Future | Human nature | Inheritance | Looks | Nature | Nothing | Past | Present | Society | Time | Will | Wrong | Theoretical | Society | Fault | Understand |
A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification - though the very longevity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
Education | Individual |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The essential quality for a mathematician is the habit of thinking things out for oneself. That habit is usually acquired in childhood. It is hard to acquire it later.
Adaptability | Education | Individual | Learning | Mind | Practice | Resentment | Skill |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The religion of one age is often the poetry of the next. Around every living and operative faith there lies a region of allegory and of imagination into which opinions frequently pass, and in which they long retain a transfigured and idealised existence after their natural life has died away. They are, as it were, deflected. They no longer tell directly and forcibly upon human actions. They no longer produce terror, inspire hopes, awake passions, or mould the characters of men; yet they still exercise a kind of reflex influence, and form part of the ornamental culture of the age. They are turned into allegories. They are interpreted in a non-natural sense. They are invested with a fanciful, poetic, but most attractive garb. They follow instead of controlling the current of thought, and being transformed by far-fetched and ingenious explanations, they become the embellishments of systems of belief that are wholly irreconcilable with their original tendencies. The gods of heathenism were thus translated from the sphere of religion to the sphere of poetry. The grotesque legends and the harsh doctrines of a superstitious faith are so explained away, that they appear graceful myths foreshadowing and illustrating the conceptions of a brighter day. For a time they flicker upon the horizon with a softly beautiful light that enchants the poet, and lends a charm to the new system with which they are made to blend; but at last this too fades away. Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays, possessing little heat, are expended in creating beauty.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
Mathematicians, it is often said, tend to be musical. It is less well known that problems arising from music have played an important role in the discovery of fundamental mathematical ideas. Questions about the vibrations of a piano string led to a fierce controversy that forced mathematicians to clarify their ideas about area, continuity, and the convergence of series.
Education | Knowledge | Nothing | Opportunity | Will | Trouble | Teacher |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
We can go a stage beyond talking about things and drawing pictures of things by arranging for the actual handling of things. There is evidence that this greatly increases the proportion of the population capable of learning mathematics and this evidence is on a mass scale.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Consequently, since this study is vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.
Belief | Body | Education | Human nature | Nature | Observation | Receive | Will | Instruction |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forced its way into the censored literature before the government realized what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The real emancipation of the Chinese people from age-long slavery would be impossible without the great, sincerely democratic enthusiasm which is rousing the working masses and making them capable of miracles, and which is evident from every sentence of Sun Yat-sen’s platform.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.