This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.
Attention | Good | Impression | Memory | Wisdom |
The school should always have as its aim that the young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist. This in my opinion is true in a certain sense even in technical schools.... The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.
Ability | Judgment | Knowledge | Man | Opinion | Personality | Sense | Thinking | Wisdom |
I have suggested that listening requires something more than remaining mute while looking attentive, namely, it requires the ability to attend imaginatively the another's language. Actually, in listening we speak the others' words.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Ability | Example | Ideas | Intelligence | Mind | Time | Wisdom |
F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Ability | Example | Ideas | Intelligence | Mind | Time | Wisdom |
A. H. R. Fairchild, fully Arthur Henry Rolph Fairchild
The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.
Ability | Calmness | Culture | Day | Flexibility | Judgment | Life | Life | Mind | Openness | Problems | Question | Self | Sympathy | Wisdom | Flexibility |
F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve
The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce.
Ability | Education | Future | Knowledge | Past | Service | Skill | Vision | Wisdom | Think |
Great ability without discretion comes almost invariably to a tragic end.
Ability | Discretion | Wisdom |
Howard Gardner, fully Howard Earl Gardner
Young children possess the ability to cut across the customary categories; to appreciate usually undiscerned links among realms, to respond effectively in a parallel manner to events which are usually categorized differently, and to capture these original conceptions in words.
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 |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the function of the imagination.
Ability | Cowardice | Imagination | Panic | Wisdom |
Politicians... rise predominantly from... the "lower middle class"; most are self-made men... ; most depend on their political jobs for their livelihood and most have little time, inclination, or opportunity for adult education; hence the dominating qualities of so many are greed, vulgarity, attention to special interest, avarice, and selfishness.
Attention | Avarice | Education | Greed | Inclination | Little | Men | Opportunity | Qualities | Self | Selfishness | Time | Vulgarity | Wisdom |