This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Absence | Bible | Humor | Literature | Bible |
The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other. The human body provides our closest experience of the interplay of actualities in nature.
Body | Existence | Experience | Nature |
Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.
Books | Experience | Observation |
Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Individual | Life | Life | Meaning |
André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.
Emotions | Experience | Important |
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves but in our attitude towards them.
Meaning |
Loneliness is bred of a mind that has grown earthbound. For the spirit has its homeland, which is the realm of the meaning of things.
Loneliness | Meaning | Mind | Spirit |
Our very psychology has been shaken to its foundation. To grasp the meaning of the world today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true nature, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.
Language | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Past | Psychology | Reason | World |
Peace is present when man can see the face that is composed of things that have meaning and are in their place. Peace is present when things form part of a whole greater than their sum, as the diverse minerals in the ground collect to become the tree.
Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundation of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
Abstract | Association | Devotion | Experience | Nature | Phenomena | Power | Principles | Theories | Association |
Elderly Men... have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They ‘think,’ but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefor suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but... love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love. They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive... They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past... Old men may feel pity, as well as young men, but not for the same reason. Young men feel it out of kindness; old men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls anyone else might easily happen to them.
Business | Day | Evil | Experience | Future | Hate | Hope | Kindness | Life | Life | Little | Love | Memory | Men | Nothing | Past | Pity | Reason | Weakness | Will | Old |
Antonio Machado, fully Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz
The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.
Intellectual virtues owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit... From this fact it is plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.
Birth | Experience | Growth | Habit | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Time | Virtue | Virtue |