This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In the elder days of Art, builders wrought with greatest care each minute and unseen part; for the gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well both the unseen and the seen; make the house where gods may dwell beautiful, entire, and clean, else our lives are incomplete standing in these walls of Time, broken stairways, where the feet stumble, as they seek to climb. Build today, then, strong and sure, with a firm and ample base; and ascending and secure shall tomorrow finds its place. Thus alone can we attain to those turrets, where the eye sees the world as one vast plain, and one boundless reach of sky.
The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.
The hungry of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.
So sharply and clearly marked are the boundaries of morality and self-love that even the commonest eye cannot fail to distinguish whether a thing belongs to the one or the other.
Distinguish | Love | Morality | Self | Self-love |
The eye is the inlet to the soul, and it is well to beware of him whose visual organs avoid your honest regard.
The fact that the eye constantly thrusts outwards distracts us from self-knowledge and the way inwards. It dissipates attention... The eye says I. We sense when someone is looking at us. Their gaze insists: Pay attention to me! Almost everyone is also aware of that when the observer is standing behind us. We notice after a while. Someone is there. Who is it? Who would not, however, know if someone were listening to us if he or she did not say so. The listener does not put the emphasis on himself or event the other person. He does not insist on a separation between subject and object. The ear establishes a 'more correct' relationship between ourselves and others. It implies unity rather than division. Eye and ear need one another. Ear and eye are not alternatives.
Attention | Knowledge | Listening | Need | Object | Relationship | Self | Self-knowledge | Sense | Unity |
The eye can only compare and estimate; the ear measures... Both the ear and the eye can evaluate, supplying us with intellectual, psychological, and emotional information of qualitative relevance. But only the ear can measure, thereby mediating quantitative and numerically precise information. If the eye wants to operate quantitatively it can at most estimate, but - as we all know - it is only able to provide approximations, and very often miscalculates. That is why the term 'optical illusion' exists in our language.
The world is a single whole. Everything is linked with everything else. The world 'sounds'. It is a 'chord'. The imagination and freedom necessary for feeling, experiencing, and living through - rather than merely knowing - these are more likely to be associated with an ana-logical process of perception than with logical thinking. Logic aims at security. The ana-logician has the courage to embark on risk and adventure. Logic is goal-oriented and passes judgment. Analogy ponders and establishes relationships. The logician sees. The ana-logician listens... The eye glimpses surfaces and is attached to them, always remaining superficial (on the surface). The ear penetrates deep into the realms it investigates through hearing.
Adventure | Aims | Courage | Freedom | Imagination | Judgment | Knowing | Logic | Perception | Risk | Security | Thinking | World |
Those evils I deserve, yet despair not of His final pardon whose ear is ever open and his eye gracious to readmit the supplicant.
The intelligence of affection is carried on by the eye only; good-breeding has made the tongue falsify the heart, and act a part of continued restraint, while nature has preserved the eyes to herself, that she may not be disguised or misrepresented.
Good | Heart | Intelligence | Nature | Restraint |
Lorenz Oken, born Lorenz Okenfuss
The eye takes a person into the world. The ear brings the world into a human being.
World |
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snails eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one’s head about.
Extreme | Light | Man | Mystery | Science | Sense | Wonder | Worth |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
The painter who draws by practice and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite it without knowledge of the same.
The beautiful! It is beauty seen with the eye of the soul.
The overcoming of private property means the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it means this emancipation precisely because these senses and qualities have become human both subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object derived from and for the human being. The senses have therefore become theoreticians immediately in their practice. They try to relate themselves to their subject matter for its own sake, but the subject matter itself is an objective human relation to itself and to the human being, and vice versa. Need or satisfaction have thus lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.
Means | Nature | Need | Object | Practice | Property | Qualities | Vice |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
What beauty enters through the eye!... Through the window of the eye the soul regards the world's beauty. For the eye endureth the soul the prison of human form. Without the eye that prison were its torment.