This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No one should make a statement like "youth is the happiest time of life" without being prepared to accept its intellectual consequences.
The function of art is no longer to satisfy wants, including intellectual wants, but to serve as a stimulus to further creation. The Sistine Chapel is valuable not for the feelings it aroused in the past but for the creative acts it will instigate in the future. Art comes into being through a chain of inspiration.
Art | Feelings | Future | Inspiration | Past | Wants | Will | Wisdom | Art |
High theory and mere mind-stimulation are secondary; living itself - in the real world, among people - is the essence... I hereby promise to attempt to be a mensh, a decent, caring human being. Neutrality, noncommitment, indifference have no place in life. To be fully human, we are committed to being caring, sensitive, aggressively compassionate people. Our lives are defined by how we act. We are alive because we perform just and righteous deeds, deeds of gentle loving kindness.
Deeds | Indifference | Kindness | Life | Life | Mind | Neutrality | People | Promise | Wisdom | World | Deeds |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
In the end we shall have to say that there is no solution of an intellectual kind and that it is part of the general mystical paradox that the mystical revelation transcends the intellect.
Mystical | Paradox | Revelation | Wisdom |
It is not the eye, that sees the beauty of the heaven, nor the ear, that hears the sweetness of music or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident, but the soul, that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savory are its perceptions.
Accident | Beauty | Heaven | Music | Soul | Wisdom | Beauty |
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways.
The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and of detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
Observation | Opinion | Rule | Wisdom |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You.
Individual | Universe | Wisdom |
Robert Aitken, fully Robert Baker Aitken
The Buddha and all his successors warn us against intellectual structures that confine us to an artificial environment, and against concepts that smear over the living fact of things in themselves. Even the idea of the Buddha must be forgotten.
I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.
Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
There runs throughout Nature unmistakable evidence of thought, corresponding to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence; and no theory that overlooks this element can be true to nature.
Evidence | Existence | Intelligence | Mind | Nature | Thinking | Thought |
J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown
Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist is likely to find that his suggestions have fallen on fertile soil so long as he delivers his message with an eye to the existing attitudes and intellectual level of his audience.
The mystic vision of God, or ecstasy of felt union with Him, is, to those who attain it, an affair of ravishing emotional intensity, of vivid intellectual illumination, and on both of these counts of supreme value.
Christian Century Editorial NULL
The ancient theory of the just war breaks down when victory is impossible, when the weapons are so undiscriminating as to destroy both sides.