This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
No. Have it here where it is quiet. You and your quiet, said Brett. What is it men feel about quiet? We like it, said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.
Little | Science | Technology | Truth | Wisdom |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.
Attention | Economics | People | Problems | System | Thinking | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Thought |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The point is that the real strength of the theory of private enterprise lies in this ruthless simplification, which fits so admirably also into the mental patterns created by the phenomenal successes of science.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Excellent! This is real life, full of antinomies and bigger than logic. Without order, planning, predictability, central control, accountancy, instructions to the underlings, obedience, discipline—without these, nothing fruitful can happen, because everything disintegrates. And yet—without the magnanimity of disorder, the happy abandon, the entrepreneurship venturing into the unknown and incalculable, without the risk and the gamble, the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread—without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
Ends | Guidance | Need | People | Science | Wisdom | Work | Guidance | Value |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.
Age | Civilization | Courage | Fear | Good | Nothing | Question | Strength |
We must desire God for ourselves and not as a means of fulfillment of our own wishes. It is a blessed mark of growth out of spiritual infancy when we can forgo the joys which once appeared to be essential, and can find our solace in him who denies them to us.
Authenticity | Feelings | God | Wisdom | Worship | God | Think |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
So we must try to distinguish between two questions that are often confused in this discussion. Is the existence of God a truth demonstrable by natural reason, so that it is knowable and known with certitude? Without a doubt the answer to this first question is “yes.” The second question is whether everyone can consider his natural reason infallible in its effort to demonstrate rationally the existence of God? The merciless criticism of the proofs of St. Augustine, St. Anselm, Descartes, Malebranche and many others are timely reminders of the need for modesty. Are we keener philosophers than they? That is the whole question. Modesty is not skepticism. So we should not be afraid to let our mind pursue the proof of God’s existence until we reach the greatest possible certitude, but we should keep intact our faith in the word that reveals this truth to the most simple folk as well as to the most learned. Here it is well to meditate on the very complex and nuanced passage in ST 2-2.2.4: “Is it necessary to believe what can be proved by natural reason?” The answer is in the affirmative: “We must accept by faith not only what is above reason but also what can be known by reason.”
Beginning | Body | Experience | Giving | Life | Life | Looks | Philosophy | Wisdom | Learn |
Theology is about God, and God is Spirit … we have accumulated a lot of experience in the Christian community of persons treating theology as a subject in which God is studied in the ways we are taught to study in our schools—acquiring information that we can use, or satisfying our curiosity, or obtaining qualifications for a job or profession. There are, in fact, a lot of people within and outside formal religious settings who talk and write a lot about spirituality, things of the spirit or the soul or higher things, but are not interested in God. There is a wonderful line in T. H. White’s novel of King Arthur (The Once and Future King), in which Guinevere in her old age becomes the abbess of a convent: ‘she was a wonderful theologian but she wasn’t interested in God.’ It happens.
Children | God | Liberty | People | Rhetoric | Service | Wisdom | Work | Instruction | God |
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Integrity | Man | Men | Relationship | Responsibility | Title | Wisdom |
I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me--and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting--into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school.
Hence comes to man the more sustainable the enjoyment of his heart, the pleasure of melancholy, this charming full of secrets, that the fact live in his pain and s' love yet in the sense of its ruin?
Wisdom |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
Children | Experience | Wisdom | Old |
Enjoy, there is no other wisdom do enjoy your similar, there is no other virtue.
Wisdom |
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.
Age | Experience | Future | God | Old age | People | Soul | Spirit | Study | Theology | God | Old |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ...Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.
Wisdom |