This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Errors to be dangerous must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation; from pure extravagance, and genuine, unmingled falsehood, the world never has, and never can sustain any mischief.
Extravagance | Falsehood | Truth | Wisdom | World |
The pyramidal effect is essential to all the arts - the effect of starting from the level, rising to the supreme height, and sinking back to the original level again. This in truth is the meaning of key in music; in art, as in life, the secret of happiness is first of all to get as far away from home as you can, and then get back to your home: every work of art is a sort of Prodigal Son, that learns to appreciate the fixed point in space as in ethics, by straying from it.
Art | Ethics | Life | Life | Meaning | Music | Space | Truth | Wisdom | Work | Art | Happiness |
There is nothing so powerful as truth - and often nothing so strange.
F. G. Trafford, pseudonymn of Charlotte Eliza Lawson, née Charlotte Cowan, Mrs. J.H. Riddell
All truth contains an echo of sadness.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
A democracy can obtain truth only as the result of experience; and many nations may perish while they are awaiting the consequences of their errors.
Consequences | Democracy | Experience | Nations | Truth | Wisdom |
Whatever pain or problem we have, it helps us find a quality of presence - where we can open to it, see it, feel it, and find the truth concealed in it - that is our healing.
Just as divine truth is what God orders and produces as He comes to know it, so human truth is what man arranges and makes as he knows it. In this way knowledge is cognition of the genus or mode by which a thing is made, and by means of which, as the mind comes to know the mode, because it arranges the elements, it makes the thing. Divine truth is solid because God grasps all things; human truth is two-dimensional because man grasps the externals of things.
God | Knowledge | Man | Means | Mind | Truth | Wisdom | God |
Truth is always congruous and agrees with itself; every truth in the universe agrees with all others.
Perry F. Webb, fully Perry Flynt Webb or Perry Flint Webb
The home... is the lens through which we get our first look at marriage and all civic duties; it is the clinic where, by conversation and attitude, impressions are created with respect to sobriety and reverence; it is the school where lessons of truth or falsehood, honesty or deceit are learned; it is the mold which ultimately determines the structure of society.
Conversation | Deceit | Falsehood | Honesty | Marriage | Respect | Reverence | Society | Truth | Wisdom | Respect |
An error is more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.