This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What we need most is not so much the ideal as to idealize the real.
Nelson Goodman, fully Henry Nelson Goodman
Nothing whatever can be said in support of the assumption that nature will usually follow the simpler theory... The simplest theory is to be chosen not because it is most likely to be true but because it is scientifically the most rewarding among equally likely alternatives. We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.
Hope | Nature | Nothing | Simplicity | Truth | Will | Wisdom |
Soma Golden, fully Soma Golden Behr
Abortion almost always symbolizes failure - the failure of a contraceptive, of a relationship, of a family, of a dream, even of a social system. Government need not add an extra lash to the whip.
Failure | Family | Government | Need | Relationship | System | Wisdom | Government | Failure |
The figures prove that the absolute easiest way to be poor is to be born out of wedlock to a young woman. If you need a statistic to memorize, try this one: 92.8 percent of all children in black, single female-headed families where the mother is under thirty and did not complete high school, are in poverty.
Absolute | Children | Mother | Need | Poverty | Wisdom | Woman |
Lawrence Hyde, 1st Earl of Rochester
It is undeniable that a man needs to be provided with some sort of philosophical background for his existence. And still more... does he need to be provided with a proper system of transcendental cosmology. But it remains true that the primary concern of the seeker after spiritual fulfillment is not with philosophy, but with wisdom.
Existence | Fulfillment | Man | Need | Philosophy | System | Wisdom |
We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
It is often the scientist’s experience that he senses the nearness of truth when... connections are envisioned. A connection is a step toward simplification, unification. Simplicity is indeed often the sign of truth and a criterion of beauty.
Beauty | Experience | Simplicity | Truth | Wisdom |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Both these perspectives - that the government is responsible for us, and that we are responsible only for ourselves - are dehumanizing. To be fully human, we can neither give up responsibility for ourselves nor refuse responsibility for others. Indeed, we need to redefine individual responsibility to include social responsibility.
Government | Individual | Need | Responsibility | Wisdom | Government |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
The answer to the accumulating casualties of the welfare state’s “war” on poverty is the home-grown, grass-roots, all-volunteer army of ordinary people armed with food, books, skills and a determination to make a difference. The entrepreneurial creativity that catapulted this nation to a position of global leadership can now be harnessed to do for community what it did for productivity. When we provide imaginative, entrepreneurial alternatives to the welfare state, we won’t need to confront it. It will simply wither away. And the rewards of this work are a bounty of spiritual renewal: an abundance of love, meaning and connectedness.
Abundance | Books | Creativity | Determination | Global | Love | Meaning | Need | People | Position | Poverty | War | Will | Wisdom | Work | Leadership |
As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder.
Age | Beauty | Children | Conformity | Curiosity | Experience | Hunger | Need | Science | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Beauty | Value |
When shall we learn that he who multiplieth possessions, multiplieth troubles, and that the one single use of things which we call our own, is that they may be his who hath need of them?
Need | Possessions | Troubles | Wisdom | Learn |
Instead of production, primarily, we have to think of sustainability. Instead of dominating nature, we have to acknowledge that nature is our source and best teacher. Instead of understanding the world in parts, we need to think about the whole.
What we call mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.
Mind | Nothing | Simplicity | Wisdom |
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put foundations under them.