This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Doubt is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization - the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best.
Age | Civilization | Darkness | Day | Disease | Doubt | Faith | Intelligence | Light | Price | Wisdom |
Military intelligence - a contradiction in terms.
Contradiction | Intelligence | Wisdom |
If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable.
Eternal | Intelligence | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Reality | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
There seems to be direct link between truly creative intelligence and the ability to dilute consciousness, to cut mental corners and practice unusual, lateral thinking in what amounts almost to a state of trance. All the most profound insights seem to flow from breaches in the barrier between waking thought, which tends to be conservative, and dream logic, which is essential liberal.
Ability | Consciousness | Intelligence | Logic | Practice | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom |
Use all your intelligence and experience in managing your own life, employing the tenderness you would expect to find in a being of ideal kindness.
Experience | Intelligence | Kindness | Life | Life | Tenderness | Wisdom |
Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an accumulation of acts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia who hasn't learned how to use information productively.
Important | Intelligence | Knowledge | Wisdom | World |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
It is the emotion which drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.
The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.
Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
The most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The most important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence and it marks the difference between a man of sense and a fool.
Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles of learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.
Intelligence | Learning | Will | Wisdom | Learn |
You must ask yourself first, what God is. You must see how at the very bottom of His existence, as you conceive of it, lie these two thoughts – purpose and righteousness; how absolutely impossible it is to give God any personality except as the fulfillment of these two qualities – the intelligence that plans in love, and the righteousness that lives in duty.
Duty | Existence | Fulfillment | God | Intelligence | Love | Personality | Purpose | Purpose | Qualities | Righteousness | God |
Success is not primarily a matter of circumstances or native talent or even intelligence – it is a choice.
Choice | Circumstances | Intelligence | Success | Talent |
As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.
Enough | Intelligence |
Sentient species think (to the extent that this is possible for their species) and act rationally most of the time. To do otherwise reduces the species chances of survival because their home (the universe) is rationally (i.e., causally) constructed. The universe’s causality binds thinking, language and intelligence together.
Intelligence | Language | Survival | Thinking | Time | Universe | Think |
The infinite expanse of the universe, its growth through immeasurable periods of time, the boundless range of its changes, and the rational order that pervades it all, seems to demand an infinite intelligence behind its manifestations.
Growth | Intelligence | Order | Time | Universe |