This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development as supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.
Achievement | Belief | Civilization | Existence | Faith | Illusion | Instinct | Perfection | Present | Wisdom | Work |
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 |
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, pen name Amanda Cross
Marriage today must... be concerned not with the inviolable commitment of constancy and unending passion, but with the changing patterns of liberty and discovery.
Commitment | Constancy | Discovery | Liberty | Marriage | Passion | Wisdom |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
There is a distinction, but no opposition, between theory and practice. Each to a certain extent supposes the other. Theory is dependent on practice; practice must have preceded theory.
Distinction | Opposition | Practice | Wisdom |
Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.
Age | Art | Literature | Men | Public | Science | Sound | Thinking | Tradition | Wisdom | Old |
A current time-slice theory makes the justificational status of a belief wholly a function of what is true of the cognizer at the time of belief. An historical theory makes the justificational status of a belief depend on its prior history. Since my historical theory emphasizes the reliability of the belief-generating processes, it may be called ‘historical reliabilism.’
Belief | History | Reliability | Time | Wisdom |
Edmund Husserl, fully Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl
Cognition is, after all, only human cognition, bound up with human intellectual forms, and unfit to reach the very nature of things, to reach things in themselves.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
We are each a cell in the common body. When we choose to create, to activate the Godness within us, our movements affect and influence the whole. But until we really know this at a cellular level, our commitment to our own awakening remains an act of faith.
Awakening | Body | Commitment | Faith | Influence | Wisdom |
Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
Sterling M. McMurrin, fully Sterling Moss McMurrin
An educated man is one who loves knowledge and will accept no substitutes and whose life is made meaningful through the never-ending process of the cultivation of his total intellectual resources.
Cultivation | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Will | Wisdom |
As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical, and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both.
Body | God | Human nature | Law | Mind | Nature | Rule | Strength | Wisdom | God |
Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley
Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority.
Education | Obligation | Respect | Responsibility | Right | Society | Sound | Superiority | Teach | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Respect | Youth |
D. Z. Phillips, fully Dewi Zephaniah Phillips
Clearly a man’s commitment to God shows itself in the language he uses, not only about God, but about the world and his general behavior.
Behavior | Commitment | God | Language | Man | Wisdom | World | God |