This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
One must be an inventor to read well... There is creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Invention | Labor | Mind | Reading | Sense | World | Writing |
Nothing astonishes men as much as common sense and plain dealings.
Common Sense | Men | Nothing | Sense |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, Therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Faith | Forgiveness | Friend | Good | History | Hope | Love | Nothing | Sense | Worth |
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Common Sense | Men | Nothing | Sense |
Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false - which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ - is naturally equal in all men.
Spiritual teachers emphasize that by abandoning our preconceived ideas and ordinary perceptual filters, we can experience high states of consciousness, inexpressible delight, and a sense of innocence and mystery about existence... the transfiguration of life from a vale of tears into a celebration of truth and beauty.
Beauty | Consciousness | Existence | Experience | Ideas | Innocence | Life | Life | Mystery | Sense | Tears | Truth |
Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds fulfillment of something implanted in its nature.
The soul when using the body as an instrument of perception - that is to say, when using the sense of sigh and hearing, or some other sense - for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses - is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal) and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change... But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.
Body | Change | Eternity | Meaning | Perception | Sense | Soul | World |
Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
This astonishing change in outlook has been brought about by assuming that, of all the elements of our total experience, only those elements which acquaint us with the quantitative aspects of material phenomona are concerned with the real world. They alone refer to an objective world. None of the other elements of our experience, our perception of colour, etc., our response to beauty, our sense of mystic communion with God, have objective counterparts. All these things, which are ultimately products of the motions of little particles, are illusory in the sense that they do not acquaint us with the nature of objective reality.
Beauty | Change | Experience | God | Little | Nature | Perception | Reality | Sense | World |
Compassion is a far greater and nobler thing than pity. Pity has its roots in fear, and a sense of arrogance and condescension, sometimes even a smug feeling of “I’m glad its not me.”
Arrogance | Compassion | Fear | Pity | Sense |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis - in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action.
Action | Control | Humanity | Nature | Reality | Sense | Society | Society |
There can be no substitute for elemental virtues... only by each of us steadfastly keeping in mind that there can be no substitute for the world-old commonplace qualities of truth, justice and courage, thrift, industry, common sense and genuine sympathy with the fellow feelings of others.
Common Sense | Courage | Feelings | Industry | Justice | Mind | Qualities | Sense | Sympathy | Thrift | Truth | World |
Ted Turner, fully Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III
Insecurity breeds greatness. To get to the top in virtually anything today, you really have to make a superhuman effort. You won't ever find a super-achiever anywhere who wasn't or isn't motivated, at least partially, by a sense of insecurity.
Effort | Greatness | Insecurity | Sense |
Thomas De Quincey, fully Thomas Penson De Quincey
A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones, into the unity of breathing life.
Life | Life | Memory | Men | Power | Scholar | Sense | Unity |