This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Boris Pasternak, fully Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just fiction, it’s a part of our fortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.
Body | Day | Fortune | Health | Life | Life | Majority | Misfortune | Nothing | Soul | Space | System |
It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.
Authority | Blame | Compassion | Creed | Discipline | Faith | Habit | Love | Past | Philosophy | Religion | Science | Society | Worship | Crisis |
The arms race is based on an optimistic view of technology and a pessimistic view of man. It assumes there is no limit to the ingenuity of science and no limit to the deviltry of human beings.
The Nine Mistakes [about ways to think about the meaning of life]: (1) Only the infinite has meaning; the finite can only have meaning insofar as it participates in the infinite. (2) The meaning of life consists in some goal or purpose. (3) The meaning of life is happiness. (4) The meaning of life must be invented. (5) Life cannot have a meaning if the universe is entirely composed of matter, as science teaches us. (6) The sole or primary purpose of evaluations is to guide our choice of actions, and value judgments are reducible to reasons for action. (7) The meaning of a person’s life cannot extend to things beyond the boundaries of his or her mode of living. (8) A person’s life does not having meaning because only linguistic items can be meaningful. (9) The meaning of our lives consists in our living in accordance with a self-determined life-plan.
Action | Choice | Life | Life | Meaning | Plan | Purpose | Purpose | Science | Self | Universe | Think | Value |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
The highest wisdom has but one science - the science of the whole - the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.
Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science.
There is no such thing as ethical truth. However, those committed to humane-egalitarian ideals can make a truth-claim rare and precious: they can look reality and the truths of science in the face and find nothing that makes them flinch.
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
Common Sense | Science | Sense |
Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.