This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes not victories without it.
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.
Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man?s intelligence may remain unaltered; and yet the instruments that he uses will increase and improve, the language that fixes and determines his ideas will acquire greater breadth and precision and, unlike mechanics where an increase of force means a decrease of speed, the methods that lead genius to the discovery of truth increase at once the force and the speed of its operations.
Discovery | Force | Genius | Ideas | Intelligence | Language | Means | Men | Mind | Precision | Strength | Truth | Will | Precision | Discovery | Truths | Understand |
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
An average person with average talents and average ambition can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society; if that person has clear focused goals.
It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man.
Ambiguity | Anger | Behavior | Cause | Conduct | Feelings | Genius | Life | Life | Love | Man | Reality | Sense | Simplicity | Time |
Maximilien Robespierre, fully Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre
Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.
A million and half children were poisoned by the Ziklon gas during the Holocaust. Now Israel's children were about to be poisoned by radioactivity. For two years we have lived in the shadow if the danger awaiting Israel from nuclear reactor in Iraq. This would have been a new Holocaust . It was prevented by the heroism of our pilots to whom we owe so much.
Love in all its greater expressions requires dedication as well as natural attraction, and steadfastness through many kinds of difficulty. But it is always renewable, and it can take root anywhere. Indeed, it is part of the genius of love that it can be summoned in situations where its existence at first seems impossible.
Dedication | Existence | Genius | Love |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.
Genius |
Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.
If the believer has his troubles with evil, the atheist has more and graver difficulties to contend with. Reality stumps him altogether, leaving him baffled not by one consideration but by many, from the existence of natural law through the instinctual cunning of the insect to the brain of the genius and the heart of the prophet. This then is the intellectual reason for believing in God: That, though this belief is not free from difficulties, it stands out, head and shoulders, as the best answer to the riddle of the universe.
Belief | Consideration | Cunning | Existence | Genius | Heart | Law | Reality | Reason | Troubles |
Whatever is highest and holiest is tinged with melancholy. The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
Men of genius are meters destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.
Genius |
Murray D. Lincoln, fully Murray Danforth Lincoln
Men of genius are the worst possible models for men of talent.
Hinduism has seemed singularly able to accept the dispassionate impersonality of the All in One without crying out against it in despair, rage or rebellion. Perhaps this is the genius of this paradoxical land of so many blended cultures and people
On a normal day, ... we value heroism because it is uncommon. On Sept. 11, we valued heroism because it was everywhere.
Value |
If the genius of invention were to reveal to-morrow the secret of immortality, of eternal beauty and youth, for which all humanity is aching, the same inexorable agents which prevent a mass from changing suddenly its velocity would likewise resist the force of the new knowledge until time gradually modifies human thought.
Beauty | Eternal | Force | Genius | Humanity | Invention | Knowledge | Time | Beauty |
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy.
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.
Genius |