This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Beyond the logic concerned with things, education must provide the possibility of awakening and cultivating moral aesthetic intuitions. It is the neglect of these higher values that has reduced life to a mere struggle for existence and to the detriment of social and human values in economic and political life.
Aesthetic | Awakening | Education | Existence | Life | Life | Logic | Neglect | Struggle |
Man’s dwelling place, who could found you on reasoning, or build your walls with logic? You exist, and you exist not. You are, and are not. True, you are made out of diverse materials, but for your discovery an inventive mind was needed. Thus if a man pulled his house to pieces, with the design of understanding it, all he would have before him would be heaps of bricks and stones and tiles. he would not be able to discover therein the silence, the shadows and the privacy they bestowed. Nor would he see what service this mass of bricks, stones and tiles could render him, now that they lacked the heart and soul of the architect, the inventive mind which dominated them. For in mere stone the heart and soul of man have no place. But since reasoning can deal with only such material things as bricks and stones and tiles, and there is no reasoning about the heart and soul that dominate them and thus transform them into silence - inasmuch as the heart and soul have no concern with the rules of logic or the science of numbers - this is where I step in and impose my will. I, the architect; I, who have a heart and soul; I, who wield the power of transforming stone into silence. I step in and mold that clay, which is the raw material, into the likeness of the creative vision that comes to me from God; and not through any faculty of reason. Thus, taken solely by the savor it will have, I build my civilization; as poets build their poems, bending phrases to their will and changing words, without being called upon to justify the phrasing of the changes, but taken solely by the savor these will have, vouched by their hearts.
Civilization | Design | Discovery | God | Heart | Justify | Logic | Man | Mind | Power | Reason | Science | Service | Silence | Soul | Understanding | Vision | Will | Words | Discovery |
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral philosophy, grace; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Grace | Logic | Man | Mathematics | Men | Philosophy | Reading | Rhetoric | Wise |
Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit. How sad it would be, I thought, if we humans ultimately were to lose all sense of mystery, all sense of awe, if our left brains were utterly to dominate the right so that logic and reason triumphed over intuition and alienated us absolutely from our innermost being, from our hearts, from our souls.
Awe | Intuition | Logic | Mystery | Reason | Right | Science | Sense | Spirit | Thought |
The world is a single whole. Everything is linked with everything else. The world 'sounds'. It is a 'chord'. The imagination and freedom necessary for feeling, experiencing, and living through - rather than merely knowing - these are more likely to be associated with an ana-logical process of perception than with logical thinking. Logic aims at security. The ana-logician has the courage to embark on risk and adventure. Logic is goal-oriented and passes judgment. Analogy ponders and establishes relationships. The logician sees. The ana-logician listens... The eye glimpses surfaces and is attached to them, always remaining superficial (on the surface). The ear penetrates deep into the realms it investigates through hearing.
Adventure | Aims | Courage | Freedom | Imagination | Judgment | Knowing | Logic | Perception | Risk | Security | Thinking | World |
Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
Even if the Universe existed for man’s sake and man existed for the purpose of serving God, one must still ask: What is the end of serving God? He does not become more perfect if all His creatures serve Him. Nor would he lose anything if nothing existed beside Him. It might perhaps be replied that the service of God is not intended for God’s perfection, but for our own. Then, however, the question arises: What is the object of our being perfect? Pressing the inquiry as to the purpose of Creation, we must at last arrive at the answer: it was the will of God. Logic as well as tradition prove clearly that the Universe does not exist for man’s sake, but that all things in it exist each for its own sake.
God | Inquiry | Logic | Man | Nothing | Object | Perfection | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Service | Tradition | Universe | Will | God |
Wisdom is like gold ore in the ground, mixed with rock and sand; logic is the mercury used to extract the gold dust.
Properly, there is no other knowledge but that which is got by working; the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools; a thing floating in the clouds. endless logic vortices, till we try and fix it.
Hypothesis | Knowledge | Logic | Rest |
Modern thought is the prison of the soul and stands between man and his spiritual mind. The logical mind cannot know absolute faith, nor can it know pure thought, for the logic feeds upon logic and does not accept things that cannot be known and proven by the flesh. Thus man has created a prison for himself and for his spirit, because he lacks belief and purity of thought. Faith needs no proof nor logic, yet man needs proof before he can have faith. Man then has created a cycle which cannot be broken, for where proof is needed, there can be no faith.
Absolute | Belief | Faith | Logic | Man | Mind | Prison | Purity | Soul | Spirit | Thought | Thought |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Religious doctrine were determined not by the logic of a few but by the needs of the many; they were a frame of belief within which the common man, inclined by nature to a hundred unsocial actions, could be formed in to a being sufficiently disciplined and self-controlled to make society and civilization possible.
Belief | Civilization | Doctrine | Logic | Man | Nature | Self | Society | Society |
Man is like an island, a circle within circles. Man is separated from these outer circles by his mind, his beliefs, and the limitations put upon him by a life away from the Earth. The circle of man, the island of self, is the place of logic, the ‘I,’ the ego, and the physical self. That is the island that man has chosen to live within today, and in doing so he has created a prison for himself. The walls of the island prison are thick, made up of doubts, logic and lack of belief. His isolation from his greater circles of self is suffocating and prevents him from seeing life clearly and purely. It is a world of ignorance where the flesh is the only reality, the only god... Beyond man’s island of ego, his prison, lies the world of the spirit-that-moves-in-all-things, the force that is found in all things. It is a world that communicates to all entities of Creation and touches the creator. It is a circle of life that houses all man’s instinct, his deepest memory, his power to control his body and mind, and a bridge that helps man transcend flesh. It is a world that expands man’s universe and helps him to fuse himself to the earth. Most of all, it is a world that brings man to his higher self and to spiritual rapture.
Belief | Body | Control | Earth | Ego | Force | God | Ignorance | Instinct | Isolation | Life | Life | Logic | Man | Memory | Mind | Power | Prison | Reality | Self | Spirit | Universe | World |
The higher order of logic and understanding that is capable of meaningfully reflecting the soul comes from the heart.
Logic | Order | Soul | Understanding |
Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.