This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Without creative personalities able to think and judge independently, the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
Character | Individual | Personality | Society | Wisdom | Society | Think |
Enthusiasm is an evil much less to be dreaded than superstition. Superstition is the disease of nations; enthusiasm that of individuals; the former grows inveterate by time; the latter is cured by it.
Character | Disease | Enthusiasm | Evil | Nations | Superstition | Time |
Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all... of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.
Age | Character | Faith | Inquiry | Morality | Mystical | Science | Superstition | Truth |
Bruno Lessing, pseudonymn for Randolph Edgar Block
The superstition in which we were brought up never loses its power over us, even after we understand it.
Character | Power | Superstition | Understand |
David Mallet, also David Malloch
Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, where patience, honor, sweet humility and calm fortitude, take root and strongly flourish.
Affliction | Character | Fortitude | Honor | Humility | Patience | Virtue | Virtue |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth.
Edmond Cahn, fully Edmond Nathaniel Cahn
Freedom is not free. Shaping and preserving society necessarily involves personal commitment, costly risk and constant effort; the cultivation of civil liberty can be no more passive than the cultivation of a farm. A man can inherit the land on which he lives, he can even inherit the first crop of produce after he takes over from those who came before him. But then if he stops, everything stops, and begins to crumble. Nothing grows, nothing ripe and rewarding comes to him, unless he plows, plants and tends the soil and unless he keeps it fertile year after year with the chemistry of effort and forethought.
Commitment | Cultivation | Effort | Forethought | Freedom | Land | Liberty | Man | Nothing | Risk | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Cyrus the Great, aka Cyrus the Elder, Cyrus II or Cyrus of Persia NULL
Soft climates breed soft men; the same soil never produces both delicacies and heroes.
He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in the soil with strong mixture of troubles.
Calamity | Courage | Human nature | Love | Nature | Need | Troubles | Will | Wisdom | Calamity |
The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable. Talent, like other things, may lie fallow.
Wisdom |
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
Philosophy | Religion | Superstition | Wisdom |
The superstition in which we grew up, though we may recognize it, does not lose its power over us. Not all are free who make mock of their chains.
Power | Superstition | Wisdom |
The institutions of a country depend in great measure on the nature of its soil and situation. Many of the wants of man are awakened or supplied by these circumstances. To these wants, manners, laws, and religion must shape and accommodate themselves. The division of land, and the rights attached to it, alter with the soil; the laws relating to its produce, with its fertility. The manners of its inhabitants are in various ways modified by its position. The religion of a miner is not the same as the faith of a shepherd, nor is the character of the ploughman so war-like as that of the hunter. The observant legislator follows the direction of all these various circumstances. the knowledge of the natural advantages or defects of a country thus form an essential part of political science and history.
Character | Circumstances | Defects | Faith | History | Knowledge | Land | Man | Manners | Nature | Position | Religion | Rights | Science | Wants | War | Wisdom |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages call inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation , in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed - I have never had any choice... Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity... The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no longer has any idea what is image, what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression.
Choice | Divinity | Freedom | Inspiration | Means | Nature | Necessity | Power | Revelation | Sense | Superstition | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Thought |
Opposition is what we want and must have, to be good for anything. Hardship is the native soil of manhood and self-reliance.
Good | Opposition | Self | Self-reliance | Wisdom | Hardship |