This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert Aitken, fully Robert Baker Aitken
The Buddha and all his successors warn us against intellectual structures that confine us to an artificial environment, and against concepts that smear over the living fact of things in themselves. Even the idea of the Buddha must be forgotten.
Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations.
Joseph Zabara, fully Joseph ben Meïr Zabara
Love is the best relationship, wisdom the best pedigree.
Love | Pedigree | Relationship | Wisdom |
Peter Abelard, Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; French: Pierre Abélard
The first key to wisdom is this – constant and frequent questioning… for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Despise | Music | Philosophy | Revelation | Wisdom | World |
Seize wisdom ere ‘tis torment to be wise; that is, seize wisdom ere she seizes thee.
I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.
That God exists can be proved in five Ways: The first and most evident Way is the argument from Motion… The second Way is from consideration of efficient Causes… The third Way is taken from consideration of the possible and the necessary… The fourth Way is the consideration of the grades of stages which are found in all things… The fifth Way is the consideration of the government of things.
Argument | Consideration | God | Government | Government | God |
Providence has given human wisdom the choice between two fates: either hope and agitation, or hopelessness and calm.
Agitation | Choice | Hope | Providence | Wisdom |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Here is the test of wisdom, wisdom is not finally tested in schools, wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things.
Excellence | Immortality | Qualities | Reality | Soul | Wisdom | Excellence |
J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown
Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist is likely to find that his suggestions have fallen on fertile soil so long as he delivers his message with an eye to the existing attitudes and intellectual level of his audience.
The mystic vision of God, or ecstasy of felt union with Him, is, to those who attain it, an affair of ravishing emotional intensity, of vivid intellectual illumination, and on both of these counts of supreme value.
J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown
Communism and Fascism or Nazism although poles apart in their intellectual content are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.
Authority | Personality | Pleasure |
Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
The world is the book where eternal Wisdom wrote its own ideas, and the living temple where, depicting its own acts and likeness, it decorated the height and the depth with living statues; so that every spirit, to guard against profanity, should read and contemplate here art and government, and each should say: “I fill the universe, seeing God in all things.” But we, souls bound to books and dead temples, copied with many mistakes from the living, place these things before such instruction. O ills, quarrels, ignorance, labors, pains, make us aware of our falling away: O let us, in God’s name, return to the original.
Art | Books | Eternal | God | Government | Ideas | Ignorance | Spirit | Universe | Wisdom | World | Art | God |