This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin.
Age | Childhood | Fear | Individual | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Paradise | Sense | Shame | Wisdom |
The free expression of opinion, as experience has taught us, is the safety-valve of passion.
Experience | Opinion | Passion | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say “the goal of all life is death,” and, casting back, “The inanimate was there before the animate.”
Death | Experience | Life | Life | Wisdom |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
Children | Experience | Experiment | Order | Taste | Wisdom |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson
Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death!... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield
It is one of the many paradoxes of psychology that the pursuit of happiness defeats its own purpose. We find happiness only when we do not directly seek it. An analogy will make this clear. In listening to music at a concert, we experience pleasurable feelings only so long as our attention is directed towards the music. But if in order to increase our happiness we give all our attention to our subjective feeling of happiness, it vanishes. Nature contrives to make it impossible for anyone to attain happiness by turning into himself.
Attention | Experience | Feelings | Listening | Music | Nature | Order | Psychology | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
Every age has its problem, by solving which, humanity is helped forward.
S. I. Hayakawa, fully Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa
It is the individual who knows how little he knows about himself who stands a chance of finding something about himself before he dies.
Chance | Individual | Little | Wisdom |
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
Experience | Life | Life | Wisdom |
Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"
Give me a chance, says Stupid, and I will show you. Ten to one he has had his chance already, and neglected it.
Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.