This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next.
Every age seeks out the appropriate medium in which to confront the unanswerable questions of human existence.
Man cannot… make circumstances for his purpose, but he always has it in his power to improve them when they occur.
Circumstances | Man | Power | Purpose | Purpose |
The age of isolation is gone. And gone are the days in which barbed wire served as demarcation lines, separating and isolating countries from one another. No country can escape looking beyond its boundaries to find the source of the currents which influence how it can live with others.
When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
By the time a baby born today in the U.S. reaches age 75, (s)he will have used on average: 4,000 barrels of oil, 54,000 pounds of plant matter, 64,000 pounds of animal products, and 43 million gallons of water – and will have produced over 3 million pounds of liquid wastes and 1,500 tons of solid wastes.
The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power.
Achievement | Attention | Circumstances | Destroy | Genius | Little | Mediocrity | Men | Nature | Power | Prison | Sense |
One person dies at the age of ten, another at the age of one hundred. Perfect saints die, and so do dangerous fools… Once dead, they are molding bones. As molding bones, they are equal. Who can tell the difference between them? Let us therefore grasp life’s moment – what is the point of worrying about the time after death?
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
Life wants to secure itself against the void that is raging within. The risk of eternal void is to be met by the premium of temporal insurance… social security, old age pensions, etc. It springs no less from metaphysical despair than from material misery.
Age | Despair | Eternal | Life | Life | Old age | Risk | Security | Wants | Old |
Common sense is that collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Age | Common Sense | Sense |
Henri Estienne, aka Henricus Stephanus
If youth only knew, if age only could.
Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.
Advice | Age | Better | Hypothesis |