This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge… Nothing becomes truly “one’s own” except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice… The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free.
Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL
If wisdom were offered me with the proviso that I should keep it shut and refrain from declaring it, I should refuse. There’s no delight in owning anything unshared.
Wisdom |
To indoctrinate the child with the prevailing world-view of the society and class in which he has been born, to enforce conformity in later life by the thunders of the priest and by the sword of the magistrate has been “the wisdom of our ancestor” at every stage in their progress from savagery to civilization.
Civilization | Conformity | Life | Life | Progress | Society | Wisdom | World | Society | Child |
And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.
Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
No two individuals have the same vision of life. It is said that only children and sages are happy because the child has not developed a material sense of value and the same knows that the material has no value. To them form is not the point of consideration but living life.
Children | Consideration | Happy | Life | Life | Sense | Vision | Child | Value |
God will have no man pressed with another’s inconveniences in matters spiritual and intellectual – no man’s salvati8on to depend on another; and every tooth that eats sour grapes shall be set on edge for itself, and for none else.
Achmad Sukarno, born Kusno Sosrodihardjo
Let us remember that no blessing of God is so sweet as life and liberty. Let us remember that the stature of all mankind is diminished so long as nations or parts of nations are still unfree. Let us remember that the highest purpose of man is the liberation of man from his bonds of fear, his bonds of human degradation, his bonds of poverty – the liberation of man from the physical, spiritual, and intellectual bonds which for too long stunted the development of mankind’s majority.
Fear | God | Liberty | Life | Life | Majority | Man | Mankind | Nations | Poverty | Purpose | Purpose | God |
A vision is to be esteemed the more noble the more intellectual it is, the more it is stripped of all image and approaches the state of pure contemplation.
Contemplation | Vision |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
People find happiness both in wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Contentment is no index of true worth.
Contentment | Folly | People | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Worth | Happiness |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
The highest wisdom has but one science - the science of the whole - the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.
Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
Skeptic always rhymes with septic; the spirit died of intellectual poisoning.
Spirit |
Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren
Young people, what need have you to follow the trendy slogans of these intellectual leaders? You ought better to gather some comrades and pool together all you energies; go forward in one common impetus, following what appears to be the path of survival. All together you will never be short of strength. If you encounter a deep forest, you can always hack your way through; you can open up the wilderness; you can dig wells in the desert. Why should you stick to old ruts and beg for guidance of these wretched guides?
Better | Guidance | Need | People | Strength | Survival | Will | Following | Guidance | Old |
Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman
It is no longer enough to be smart — all the technological tools in the world add meaning and value only if they enhance our core values, the deepest part of our heart. Acquiring knowledge is no guarantee of practical, useful application. Wisdom implies a mature integration of appropriate knowledge, a seasoned ability to filter the inessential from the essential.
Ability | Enough | Guarantee | Heart | Integration | Knowledge | Meaning | Wisdom | World | Value |