This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean of the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man - a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.
Character | Joy | Light | Man | Mind | Sense | Spirit | Thinking | Thought |
Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani
What is the meaning of life? The meaning may not be expressed in words. It transcends the mind and the intellect. The meaning is to be experienced, realized... It is open to everyone who would live according to certain disciplines... The discipline of duty. Life is a field of duty, not a dance of desires... The discipline of service... We are here to help others... The opposite of love is not hate but apathy... The discipline of silence... The meaning of life is to love God and to give the service of love to the suffering children of God. And to the birds and animals who are God’s children as well.
Apathy | Character | Children | Discipline | Duty | God | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Service | Silence | Suffering | Words | God |
David Malet Armstrong, aka D. M. Armstrong
Beliefs about particular matters of fact (including beliefs whose content is an unrestricted existentially quantified proposition) are structures in the mind of the believer which represent or ‘map’ reality, including the believer’s own mind and belief-states. The fundamental representing elements and relations of the map represent the sorts of thing they represent because they spring from capacities of the believer to act selectively towards things of that sort.
Of all exercises there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the understanding or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wisdom.
Character | Heart | Imagination | Knowledge | Mind | Nature | Understanding | Wisdom |
The absolute demonstration of man’s mastery of fate and command of all condition - the victory of man - all men in this racial man, this elder brother of mankind in his triumph over sin, fear and death! But one thing had remained in my mind as necessary to prove to the mass of men to-day man’s absolute supremacy over death in all its forms as an attribute of his oneness with God, with Eternal Life, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice, Omniscience and Omnipotence.
Absolute | Character | Day | Death | Eternal | Fate | Fear | God | Justice | Life | Life | Love | Man | Mankind | Men | Mind | Omnipotence | Omniscience | Oneness | Sin | Fate |
Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
Without some element of objectivity, without any criterion for preferring one scheme of values to another, except the criterion of what looks most attractive to oneself, there cannot in fact be any morality at all.
Character | Looks | Morality | Objectivity |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
Thou hast commanded that an ill-regulated mind should be its own punishment.
Mind | Punishment | Wisdom |
Every human being has four hungers; the hunger of the loins, the hunger of the belly, the hunger of the mind, the hunger of the soul. You can get by a long time on the loins and the belly, but there is a good deal of evidence that even the meanest men eventually crave something for the mind and soul.
Character | Evidence | Good | Hunger | Men | Mind | Soul | Time |
You are the greatest investment. The more you store in that mind of yours, the more you enrich your experience, the more people you meet, the more books you read, and the more places you visit, the greater is that investment in all that you are. Everything that you add to your peace of mind, and to your outlook upon life, is added capital that no one but yourself can dissipate.
Books | Experience | Life | Life | Mind | Peace | People | Wisdom |
Brian W. Aldiss, fully Brian Wilson Aldiss
Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.
Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"
For there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience; since many have the arguments relating to what can be known, but because they lack experience they neglect the arguments, and neither avoid what is harmful nor follow what is good. For if a man who has never seen fire should prove by adequate reasoning that fire burns and injures things and destroys them, his mind would not be satisfied thereby, nor would he avoid fire, until he placed his hand or some combustible substance in the fire, so that he might prove by experience that which reasoning taught. But when he has had actual experience of combustion his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore reasoning does not suffice, but experience does.
Doubt | Experience | Intuition | Knowledge | Light | Man | Mind | Neglect | Rest | Wisdom |
There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the tare on tallow, or the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
Contradiction | Mind | Price | Soul | Wisdom |
A brilliant mind without faith is like a beautiful face without eyes.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
The tools of the mind become burdens when the environment which made them necessary no longer exists.