This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make doing each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself.
Knowledge | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Research | Science | Space |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
So let's not mesmerize ourselves by the difficulties, but recover the common-sense view that to work is the most natural thing in the world. Only one must not be blocked by being too damn clever about itÂ…It is a fixation in the mind, that unless you can have the latest you can't do anything at all, and this is the thing that has to be overcome.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
When we move from small-scale to medium-scale, the connection between ownership and work already becomes attenuated; private enterprise tends to become impersonal and also a significant social factor in the locality; it may even assume more than local significance.
What you think about activates a vibration within you.
Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
The very best thing that can happen is that, in despairing of philosophy, they remember that God did not choose to save men through metaphysics, so that its loses be not their loss.
Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.
Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |
We live in a time when everyoneÂ’s goal is to be perpetually healthy and constantly happy. If any one of us fails to live up to the standards that are advertised as normative, we are labeled as a problem to be solved, and a host of well-intentioned people rush to try out various cures on us.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
A credulous, religious-minded fool, as I've pointed out! And he carried his credulity into the next period of his life, where he believed in one social or philosophical Ism after another, always on the trial of Truth! He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was true, that there is no truth for men, that human life in unimportant and meaningless. No. He was always grasping at some absurd new faith to find and excuse for going on!
The more a man has what he desired, he cherishes most it has.
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Conversation | Hurry | Prayer | Sense | Work |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
Common Sense | Sense | Think |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Despair | Individual | Land | Man | People | Sense | Will | Woman |