This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
If choosing freely for oneself is the highest value, the free choice to wear red socks is as valuable as the free choice to murder one’s father or sacrifice oneself for one’s friend. Such a belief is ridiculous.
Belief | Character | Choice | Father | Free choice | Friend | Murder | Sacrifice | Murder |
Ardis Whitman, fully Ardis Rumsey Whitman
Toscanini's eightieth birthday, someone asked his son, Walter, what his father ranked as his most important achievement. The son replied, "For him there can be no such thing. Whatever he happens to be doing at the moment is the biggest thing in his life - whether it is conducting a symphony or peeling an orange."
Achievement | Character | Father | Important | Life | Life |
I encounter death not so much as a problem to be solved, nor a puzzle to be pieced together, but as a mystery to be experienced. Death, whatever its meaning and real nature, seems always to elude us. It is, always and finally, a mystery. And mystery refuses to be captured and be used. We do not capture it, but are captured by it. And being captured, we can be 'engaged' to death and allow it to reveal its depth and richness.
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
At any rate it is now quite clear that neither future nor past actually exists. Nor is it right to say that there are times, past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation.
Expectation | Future | Memory | Mind | Past | Present | Right | Wisdom |
Eugene P. Bertin, fully Eugene Peter Bertin
Honest work bears a lovely face for it is the father of pleasure and the mother of good fortune. It is the keystone of prosperity and the sire of fame. And best of all, work is relief from sorrow and the handmaiden of happiness.
Fame | Father | Fortune | Good | Mother | Pleasure | Prosperity | Sorrow | Wisdom | Work |
Anxiety is the poison of human life; the parent of many sins and of more miseries. In a world where everything is doubtful, and where we may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, why this restless stir and commotion of mind? Can it alter the cause or unravel the mystery of human events?
Anxiety | Anxiety | Cause | Events | Life | Life | Mind | Mystery | Wisdom | World | Blessed | Parent |
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place.
Eternal | Eternity | Events | Future | God | Knowledge | Life | Life | Past | Present | Reason | Time | Wisdom | God |
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
One faces the future with one's past.
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Age | Enough | Family | Father | Isolation | Mother | Nature | People | Security | Wisdom | World |
Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.
Niels Bohr, fully Aage Niels Bohr
One of the favorite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.
Absurd | Contrast | Distinction | Father | Maxims | Truth | Wisdom | Truths |