This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I extend the circle of real religion very widely. Many men fear God, and love God, and have sincere desire to serve him, whose views of religious truth are very imperfect, and in some points utterly false. But may not many such persons have a state of heart acceptable before God?
Desire | Fear | God | Heart | Love | Men | Religion | Truth | Wisdom |
Understand your antagonist before you answer him... Discussion, even if story, often winnows truth from error - a good never to be expected in an uninquiring age.
We must make the truth as simple, as persuasive, as impelling, and as interesting as the lie often seems to be. The truth can never enslave, it can never mesmerize. The truth is always within us.
In the long run, truth is aided by nothing so much as by opposition.
Nothing | Opposition | Truth | Wisdom |
As time goes on, new and remoter aspects of truth are discovered, which can seldom or never be fitted into creeds that are changeless.
Diff'ring judgments serve but to declare that Truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where.
Beliefs, desires, and intentions are a condition of language, but language is also a condition for them. On the other hand, being able to attribute beliefs and desires to a creature is certainly a condition of sharing a convention with that creature; while, if I am right... convention is not a condition of language. I suggest, then, that philosopher who make convention a necessary element in language have the matter backwards. The truth is rather that language is a condition for having conventions.
Convention | Language | Right | Truth | Wisdom |
All truth is precious, if not all divine; and what dilates the powers must needs refine.
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside.
All that happens in the world of nature and man - every war, every peace, every horn of prosperity, every horn of adversity, every election, every death, every life, every success and every failure, all change, all permanence, the perished leer, the unutterable glory of stars - all things speak truth in the thoughtful spirit.
Adversity | Change | Death | Failure | Glory | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Peace | Prosperity | Spirit | Success | Truth | War | Wisdom | World |
Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
The pursuit of truth shall set you free - even if you never catch up with it.
Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, on of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite.
Art | Beauty | Ethics | God | Morality | Object | Religion | Sentiment | Truth | Wisdom | Art | God |
The first principle asserts that at least some mental events interact causally with physical events... The second principle is that where there is causality, there must be a law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws... The third principle is that there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained... from the fact that there can be no strict psychophysical laws, and without our other two principles, we can infer the truth of a version of the identity theory, that is, a theory that identifies at least some mental events with physical events.