This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
What can give us surer knowledge than our senses? With what else can we better distinguish the true from the false?
Better | Distinguish | Knowledge | Wisdom |
Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
Society's preservation and man's happiness depend on illusion. Nature itself, which certainly represents the will of God, deludes us in many respects, as when it leads us by the cords of love to reproduce the race. If a youth would consider the trouble in rearing a family, not one in a thousand would marry, but nature closes our eyes to the future (and indeed, wherever popular knowledge rises, the birth rate declines). The same is true of the other passions, which nature utilizes to deceive man and goad them toward the attainment of ends which, when attained, turn out to be but vanity.
Attainment | Birth | Ends | Family | Future | God | Illusion | Knowledge | Love | Man | Nature | Race | Society | Will | Wisdom | Youth | Youth | Trouble | Happiness |
Any frontal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end... It's a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content or of weariness.
Ignorance | Inquiry | Mind | Philosophy | Progress | Wisdom | Wonder |
The institutions of a country depend in great measure on the nature of its soil and situation. Many of the wants of man are awakened or supplied by these circumstances. To these wants, manners, laws, and religion must shape and accommodate themselves. The division of land, and the rights attached to it, alter with the soil; the laws relating to its produce, with its fertility. The manners of its inhabitants are in various ways modified by its position. The religion of a miner is not the same as the faith of a shepherd, nor is the character of the ploughman so war-like as that of the hunter. The observant legislator follows the direction of all these various circumstances. the knowledge of the natural advantages or defects of a country thus form an essential part of political science and history.
Character | Circumstances | Defects | Faith | History | Knowledge | Land | Man | Manners | Nature | Position | Religion | Rights | Science | Wants | War | Wisdom |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
All philosophy is divided into these three types. Its purpose is to seek out truth, knowledge and certainty.
Knowledge | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Truth | Wisdom |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom... It may be said with some plausibility that there is an abecedarian (meaning alphabetically or rudimentary) ignorance that comes before knowledge, and another doctoral ignorance that comes after knowledge; ignorance that knowledge creates and engenders, just as it undoes and destroys the first.
Conscience | Custom | Ignorance | Knowledge | Meaning | Nature | Wisdom |
Metastasio, aka Pietro Petastasio, pseudonymn for Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi NULL
O, how full of error is the judgment of mankind. They wonder at results when they are ignorant of the reasons. They call it fortune when they know not the cause, and thus worship their own ignorance changed into a deity.
Cause | Error | Fortune | Ignorance | Judgment | Mankind | Wisdom | Wonder | Worship |
For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit.
God | Knowledge | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Strength | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
Sterling M. McMurrin, fully Sterling Moss McMurrin
An educated man is one who loves knowledge and will accept no substitutes and whose life is made meaningful through the never-ending process of the cultivation of his total intellectual resources.
Cultivation | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Will | Wisdom |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all knowledge is moonshine.
Max Müller, fully Friedrich Max Müller
Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge of our ignorance, or in the language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.
Ignorance | Knowledge | Language | Philosophy | Wisdom |
Teaching is selling, getting young people to buy constructive knowledge to enable them to do great things with their lives.
William G. Patten, fully William George Patten, aka Gilbert Patten
Science seeks truth and discovers rightness. Religion seeks righteousness and discovers truth. Both have acquired knowledge of creative and destructive ways, and both point the same way of right living.
Knowledge | Religion | Right | Righteousness | Science | Truth | Wisdom |