This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Education is the knowledge of how to use the whole of oneself. Many men use but one or two faculties out of the score with which they are endowed. A man is educated who knows how to make a tool of every faculty - how to open it, how to keep it sharp, and how to apply it to all practical purposes.
Whatever is only almost true is quite false; and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is the more likely to lead astray. Precise knowledge is the only true knowledge, and he who does not teach exactly, does not teach at all.
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
The love of knowledge in a young mind is almost a warrant against the infirm excitement of passions and vices.
Excitement | Knowledge | Love | Mind |
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.
The more one penetrates the realm of knowledge the more puzzling everything becomes.
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
Books | Children | Excitement | Family | Knowledge | Love | Man | Means | Mind | Reading | Right | Wrong | Learn |
I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.
Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.
Knowledge | Nothing | Object | Sensibility | Thought | Understanding | Think |
All our knowledge falls within the bounds of possible experience.
Experience | Knowledge |
Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge.
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."
All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought.
Ends | Intuition | Knowledge | Mind | Nothing | Reason | Sense | Thought | Understanding | Unity |
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know -- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.
Better | Choice | Control | Destroy | Enough | Eternal | Ignorance | Knowledge | Learning | Life | Life | Price | Universe | Wise | Wonder | Learn |
Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
Adventure | Knowledge | Uncertainty |