This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If humanity is to have a hopeful future, there is no escape from the preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty.
Future | Humanity | Loneliness | Responsibility | Soul |
Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth that in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.
Better | Birth | Children | Conquest | Death | Loneliness | Marriage | Men | Sacrifice | Terror | Waiting | War | Understand |
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
For every civilization or every period of history it is true today: show me what kind of god you have and I will tell you what kind of humanity you possess.
Periods of confused anarchy… seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination.
Birth | Imagination | Marriage | Men | Nature | Soul | Intellect |
Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction… If the subjects be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance.
Capacity | Children | Humanity | Little | Order | Right | Self | Will |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.
Birth | Imagination | Marriage | Nature | Soul | Intellect |
Each child’s mind [should go] through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through. The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learned them.
Humanity | Mind | Position | Present | Race | Relationship | Child | Learn | Truths |
That in the order of ends, man (and with him every rational being) is an end in himself, that is, that he can never be used merely as a means by any (not even by God) without being at the same time an end also himself, that therefore humanity in our person must be holy to ourselves, this follows now of itself because he is the subject of the moral law, in other words, of that which is holy in itself, and on account of which and in agreement with which alone can anything be termed holy. For this moral law is founded on the autonomy of his will, as a free will which by its universal laws must necessarily be able to agree with that to which it is to submit itself.
Ends | Free will | God | Humanity | Law | Man | Means | Moral law | Order | Time | Will | Words |
There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable.
Crime | Death | Equality | Humanity | Life | Life | Murder | Retaliation | Suffering | Murder |
Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.
Birth | Daring | Life | Life | Organization |
Every temptation that is resisted, every noble aspiration that is encouraged, every sinful thought that is repressed, every bitter word that is withheld,, adds its little item to the impetus of that great movement which is bearing humanity onward toward a richer life and higher character.
Aspiration | Character | Humanity | Life | Life | Little | Temptation | Thought | Aspiration | Temptation | Thought |
All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.
Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.