This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
How many and deep are the divisions between human beings? Not only are there divisions between races, nations, classes and religions but also almost totally incomprehension between sexes, the old and young, the sick and healthy. There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
Nations | Society | Understanding | Society | Old |
The flesh believes that pleasure is limitless and that it requires unlimited time; but the mind, understanding the end and limit of the flesh and ridding itself of fears of the future, secures a complete life and has no longer any need for unlimited time.
Future | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Pleasure | Time | Understanding |
Bashfulness is a great hindrance to a man, both in uttering his sentiments and in understanding what is proposed to him; it is therefore good to press forward with discretion, both in discourse and company of the better sort.
Better | Discretion | Good | Man | Understanding |
The Occasion of the imagined Difficulty in conceiving disinterested Desires, has probably been from the attempting to define this simple Idea, Desire. It is called an uneasy Sensation in the absence of Good. Whereas Desire is as distinct from any Sensation, as the Will is from the Understanding or Senses. This every one must acknowledge, who speaks of desiring to remove Uneasiness or Pain.
Absence | Desire | Difficulty | Good | Pain | Understanding | Will |
The commandment of knowledge is yet higher than the commandment over the will: for it is a commandment over the reason, belief, and understanding of man, which is the highest part of the mind, and giveth law to the will itself. For there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne or chair of estate in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning.
Belief | Earth | Knowledge | Law | Learning | Man | Men | Mind | Power | Reason | Understanding | Will |
François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
The study of art is a taste at once engrossing and unselfish, which may be indulged without effort, and yet has the power of exciting the deepest emotions - a taste able to exercise and to gratify both the nobler and softer parts of our nature.
Art | Effort | Emotions | Nature | Power | Study | Taste | Art |
Friendship consists of a willing ear, an understanding heart and a helping hand.
Heart | Understanding |
The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.
Axioms | Nature | Sense | Understanding |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Philosophy being nothing else but the study of wisdom and truth, it may with reason be expected that those who have spent most time and pains in it should enjoy a greater calm and serenity of mind, a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men.
Evidence | Knowledge | Men | Mind | Nothing | Philosophy | Reason | Serenity | Study | Time | Truth | Wisdom |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the reunification of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent persona and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type.
Consciousness | Contradiction | Isolation | Knowing | Law | Life | Life | Love | Means | Nothing | Self | Understanding | Unity |
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
Perception is a mirror, not a fact... The ego does everything it can to prevent us from understanding that our thoughts, not the outside world, cause what we see and experience, and that the world we experience is the effect of our own thoughts.
Cause | Ego | Experience | Perception | Understanding | World |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.
For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.
Power | Understanding |
A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years' mere study of books.
How hard it is to confess that we have spoken without thinking, that we have talked nonsense. How many a man says a thing in haste and heat, without fully understanding or half meaning it, and then, because he has said it, holds fast to it, and tries to defend it as if it were true! But how much wiser, how much more admirable and attractive it is when a man has the grace to perceive and acknowledge his mistakes! It gives us assurance that he is capable of learning, of growing, of improving, so that his future will be better than his past.
Better | Future | Grace | Haste | Learning | Man | Meaning | Nonsense | Past | Thinking | Understanding | Will |
Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.
Knowledge | Nothing | Object | Sensibility | Thought | Understanding | Think |