This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. This fruitful joining cannot take the false form of percentages adding to 100—as in intelligence is 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture, or homosexuality is 50 percent inborn and 50 percent learned, and a hundred other harmful statements in this foolish format. When two ends of such a spectrum are commingled, the result is not a separable amalgam (like shuffling two decks of cards with different backs), but an entirely new and higher entity that cannot be decomposed (just as adults cannot be separated into maternal and paternal contributions to their totality).
I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.
Ideas | Imagination | Laughter | Men | Respect | Worth | Respect | Understand |
No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.
Ideas | Nature | Observation | Science | Thought | Worth | Thought |
I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.
Age | Children | Fault | History | Past | Survival | Temptation | Time | Worth | Fault | Temptation | Understand |
Many times we serve God as languishingly as if we were afraid he should accept us, and pray as coldly as if we were unwilling he should hear us, and take away that lust by which we are governed, and which conscience forces us to pray against; as if we were afraid God should set up his own throne and government in our hearts. How fleeting are we in divine meditation, how sleepy in spiritual exercises! but in other exercises active. The soul doth not awaken itself, and excite those animal and vital spirits, which it will in bodily recreations and sports; much less the powers of the soul: whereby it is evident we prefer the latter before any service to God.
Duty | Force | Lord | Men | Obedience | Prayer | Service | Space | Truth | Friends |
Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.
Argument | Day | Education | Enough | Good | Hope | Improvement | Little | Money | Problems | Recompense | Teach | Worth | Talent | Teacher | Value |
Let us appeal to ourselves, whether we are not more unwilling to secret, closet, hearty duty to God, than to join with others in some external service; as if those inward services were a going to the rack, and rather our penance than privilege. How much service hath God in the world from the same principle that vagrants perform their task in Bridewell! How glad are many of evasions to back them in the neglect of the commands of God, of corrupt reasonings from the flesh to waylay an act of obedience, and a multitude of excuses to blunt the edge of the precept!
Cause | Force | Heart | Law | Man | Nature | Principles | Will | Writing | Friends |
Since therefore all things are ordered in subserviency to the good of man, they are so ordered by Him that made both man and them; and man must acknowledge the wisdom and goodness of his Creator, and act in subserviency to His glory, as other creatures act in subserviency to his good. Sensible objects were not made only to gratify the sense of man, but to hand something to his mind as he is a rational creature; to discover God to him as an object of love and desire to be enjoyed. If this be not the effect of it, the order of the creature, as to such an one, is in vain, and falls short of its true end.
With Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophy ... with bellicose weapons and armor.
O my boy! he who doeth good shall meet with good; and he who doeth evil shall meet with evil, for the Lord requiteth a man according to the measure of his work. O my boy! what shall I say more to thee than these sayings? for the Lord knoweth what is hidden, and is acquainted with the mysteries and the secrets. And He will requite thee and will judge, betwixt me and thee, and will recompense thee according to thy desert.
Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
It is the mark of a small mind to attack others when they fail in what he undertook, he who carries on itself a spirit[Epictetus]ual work takes them to himself: he that complete this work nor does it take to oneself or to others .
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
Clyde was not one of them, and under such circumstances could not be. He might smile and be civil enough - yet he would always be in touch with those who were above them, would he not - or so they thought. He was, as they saw it, part of the rich and superior class and every poor man knew what that meant. The poor must stand together everywhere.
Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
The soul should know whither it is going and whence it came, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what is that Reason which distinguishes between the desirable and the undesirable, and thereby tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears. [Seneca]
Choice | Dawn | Duty | Good | Harmony | Ideas | Morality | Nature | Object | Order | Worth | Value |
Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
When I see a man in a state of anxiety, I say, “What can this man want? If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he still be anxious?” [Epictetus]
Administration | Body | Father | Force | God | Man | Men | Power | Revolution | Will | God |