This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The world is full of incredible, rich opportunities. If you strengthen your curiosity as you would a muscle, by exercising it regularly -- if you can empathize with the lives of others, if you are willing to see a potential friend in the face of every stranger, if you are willing to suffer some embarrassment and discomfort, and if you are patient -- you will not be stuck forever.
One serious consequence of this early adaptation is the impossibility of consciously experiencing certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, impotence, anxiety) either in childhood or later in adulthood. This is all the more tragic since we are here concerned with lively people who are especially capable of differentiated feelings. This is noticeable at those times in their analyses when they describe childhood experiences that were free of conflict. Usually these concern experiences with nature, which they could enjoy without hurting the mother or making her feel insecure, without reducing her power or endangering her equilibrium. But it is remarkable how these attentive, lively, and sensitive children who can, for example, remember exactly how they discovered the sunlight in bright grass at the age of four, yet at eight might be unable to notice anything or to show any curiosity about the pregnant mother or, similarly, were not at all jealous at the birth of a sibling. Again, at the age of two, one of them could be left alone while soldiers had been good, suffering this quietly and without crying. They have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can only experience his feeling when there is somebody there who accepts him fully, understands and supports him. If that is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love, or that of her substitute, then he cannot experience these feelings secretly just for himself but fails to experience them at all. But nevertheless....something remains.
Age | Art | Birth | Childhood | Children | Curiosity | Experience | Feelings | Impossibility | Mother | People | Power | Risk | Suffering | Art | Child |
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.
Curiosity | Little | Need | Nothing | Instruction |
I don't need glasses, but I've just reached the age where curiosity is greater than vanity.
So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
Conduct | Curiosity | Experiment | Hope | Reason | Risk | Truth |
Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life.
My curiosity was in no way cruel. Deviations from the commonplace attracted me strongly, as they still do; and to me the hermaphrodite and the living skeleton were interesting for the same reason as was Creator, or the resplendent Guardsmen of the bands
When we do elect activists, we want them to change the thinking and behavior of other people, rarely our own.
Attainment | Curiosity | Distinction | Life | Life | Passion | Wisdom | Worth |
Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them.
Curiosity | Discipline | Learning | Power |
The great movers of the human mind are the desire of good, and the fear of evil.
Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil where he is known.
Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.
Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike.
Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgment.
I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.
Courage | Curiosity | Familiarity |
Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.
Conformity | Curiosity | Nature |
Truly grand and powerful theories… do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory... If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly.
If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.