This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. D. Joske, fully William "Bill"
Many people are afraid of philosophy precisely because they dread being forced to the horrifying conclusion that life is meaningless, so that human activities are ultimately insignificant, absurd and inconsequential.
W. H. Murray, fully William Hutchinson Murray
The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
Ideas | Ignorance | Initiative | Providence |
The long-range transformation may be characterized perhaps most dramatically thus. There was a time when “I believe” as a ceremonial declaration of faith meant, and was heard as meaning: “Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty.” A statement about a person’s believing has now come to mean, rather, something of this sort: “Given the uncertainty of God, as a fact of modern life, so-and-so reports that the idea of God is part of the furniture of his mind.”
Correctness | Ideas | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Mind | Neutrality | Thought | Thought |
Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
The Jews did one other seemingly contradictory thing. They individualized religion; they made it very real and personal. And yet at the same time they universalized religion! They proclaimed the moral world-rule of one God. All this, perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of religion, was the work of a mere handful of people in a tiny, obscure country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. And all of this was the heritage or the backg
Belief | Daring | Genius | God | History | Means | People | Religion | World | God | Child | Think |
At no time have I ever thought of myself as anything other than a Christian. At no time have I ever supposed that God could not adequately reach out to me, to challenge and to comfort, in my own Christian faith and community. Yet at no time have I ever supposed that God could not also reach out to other persons in their traditions and communities as fully and as satisfyingly as he has to me in mine. At no time have I ever felt I would be justified in seeking to uproot an adherent of another tradition from his faithful following of that tradition. My Christianity—including my sense of Christian ministry—has commanded that I be open to learn from the faith of others.
William D. Hoard, fully William Dempster Hoard
The fool has set in his heart that he can get more money through the tiring of his muscle and the starvation of his brain-but he can’t.
Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
The great hope is that after all these long centuries of wandering, Christianity may return to its home and its heritage and there find once again the precious things it lost so tragically – and so soon.
Achievement | History | People | Time | Work |
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
We are living at a time when it is absolutely essential to make a clean cut distinction between the magical attitude and the religious attitude in life. We have today as men never dreamed of having in other days, coercive control over tremendous forces in the natural world. We make daily trial of these forces, we “tempt” them, and they obey. We press the button, and throw the switch, and spin the dial, and step on the accelerator and the gods of all mythology touch their caps in deferential obedience to our slightest whim. The applied sciences of the twentieth century do make magicians of us all. It should be said at once that the pure scientist stands absolutely free of the charge of practicing magic. The affinities of pure science are with religion, in that its reference is not from the universe to man’s uses, but from man to the realities of his universe. But the pure scientist is as rare a creature in our world as the pure saint. The vulgar modern heresy that society is made up of a large number of very pure scientists and an equally large number of very impure Christians is simply grotesque. Once in a while this world sees men like Saint Francis, John Woolman, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday; once in a great while. But the pure scientist is as much an exception in a university laboratory as the pure saint is an exception in a sectarian meeting house. For the most part we have at hand a society of persons practicing variously in the names of religion and science a self-willed, uncritical, and arrogant attempt to make the ultimate forces give them what they severally desire. And this temptation of the Lord their God is neither science nor religion in the noblest meaning of those words.
Challenge | Confidence | History | Literature | Magic | Man | Men | Power | Practice | Relationship | Religion | Research | Spirit | Universe | Wisdom | World |
I believe: (a) That there is no personal god or life after death (b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty (c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence (d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy or unhappy (e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life [Entries 'f' and 'g' are missing.] (h) I believe, furthermore, that an ideal state (besides ‘g’) should be a strong centralized one with government control of public utilities, banks, mines, + transportation and subsidy of the arts, a comfortable minimum wage, support of disabled and age[d]. State care of pregnant women with no distinction such as legitimate + illegitimate children.
Ideas |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.
Change | Experience | Force | History | Knowledge | Mathematics | Science | Truth |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.
Absolute | Adventure | Art | Beginning | Destiny | Emotions | Faith | Ideas | Important | Life | Life | Man | Order | Sense | Space | Story | Time | Art |
A Child Of God Longing To See Him Beloved - There's not an echo round me, But I am glad should learn, How pure a fire has found me, The love with which I burn. For none attends with pleasure To what I would reveal; They slight me out of measure, And laugh at all I feel. The rocks receive less proudly The story of my flame; When I approach, they loudly Reverberate his name. I speak to them of sadness, And comforts at a stand; They bid me look for gladness, And better days at hand. Far from all habitation, I heard a happy sound; Big with the consolation, That I have often found. I said, 'My lot is sorrow, My grief has no alloy; The rocks replied--'Tomorrow, Tomorrow brings thee joy.' These sweet and sacred tidings, What bliss it is to hear! For, spite of all my chidings, My weakness and my fear, No sooner I receive them, Than I forget my pain, And, happy to believe them, I love as much again. I fly to scenes romantic, Where never men resort; For in an age so frantic Impiety is sport. For riot and confusion They barter things above; Condemning, as delusion, The joy of perfect love. In this sequestered corner, None hears what I express; Delivered from the scorner, What peace do I possess! Beneath the boughs reclining, Or roving o'er the wild, I live as undesigning And harmless as a child. No troubles here surprise me, I innocently play, While Providence supplies me, And guards me all the day: My dear and kind defender Preserves me safely here, From men of pomp and splendour, Who fill a child with fear
Better | Chance | Good | History | Hope | Husband | Instinct | Nothing | Time | Wife | Afraid | Parent |
Invention depends altogether upon execution or organization; as that is right or wrong so is the invention perfect or imperfect.
Conscience | Ideas | Man |
Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face; terror the human form divine, and secrecy the human dress. The human dress is forged iron, the human form a fiery forge, the human face a furnace seal d, the human heart its hungry gorge.
History | Individual | Merit | Reason |
There used to be a garden-type place in the Bowery -- flowers, plants and benches -- where the bums would go snooze and wine-dream. I envied their art of measured imbibing. I used to give them money to buy their sweet wine. Why not help them feel good? Now, me, I used to be a boozer. I had to stop. I couldn't drink, sip by sip, through the day, just enough, like they could. I would just get stoned and sick. How did they do it? I envied them that.
I feel now if I think of it, it will come out in the painting. In other words, if I want to make the whole painting look like a bottle, like a lot of bottles - for instance maybe the end of the day, when everything is very light, but not in sunlight necessarily - and so if I have this image of this bottle and if I really think about it, it will come out in the painting. That doesn’t mean that people notice a bottle, but I know when I succeed in it – then the painting would have this.
I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.
Wassily Kandinsky understood ‘form’ as a form, like an object in the real world; and a object, he said, was a narrative – and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted ‘his music without words’. He wanted to be ‘simple as a child’. He intended, with his ‘inner-self’ to rid himself of ‘philosophical barricades’ (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me.
Age | Desire | Future | Happy | Ideas | Life | Life | Think |
Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.