This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
There is no possible method of compelling a child to feel sympathy or affection.
The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.
Method |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
Common Sense | Method | Mistake | Sense | Temper |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Man is an animal, formidable both from his passions and his reasons; his passions often urging him to great evils, and his reason furnishing means to achieve them. To train this animal, and make him amenable to order, to inure him to a sense of justice and virtue, to withhold him from ill courses by fear, and encourage him in his duty by hopes, in short to fashion and model him for society, hath been the aim of civil and religious institutions; and, in all times, the endeavor of good and wise men. The aptest method for attaining this end hath been always judged a proper education.
Duty | Education | Fear | Good | Justice | Man | Means | Men | Method | Model | Order | Reason | Sense | Society | Virtue | Virtue | Wise |
Method is the hinge of business, and there is no method without order and punctuality.
Business | Method | Order | Punctuality |
Nine times out of ten, optimism is a sly form of selfishness, a method of isolating oneself from the unhappiness of others.
Method | Optimism | Selfishness | Unhappiness |
The picture of scientific method drafted by modern philosophy is very different from traditional conceptions. Gone is the ideal of a universe whose course follows strict rules, a predetermined cosmos that unwinds itself like an unwinding clock. Gone is the ideal of the scientist who knows the absolute truth. The happenings of nature are like rolling dice rather than like revolving stars; they are controlled by probability laws, not by causality, and the scientist resembles a gambler more than a prophet. He can tell you only his best posits - he never knows beforehand whether they will come true. He is a better gambler, though, than the man at the green table, because his statistical methods are superior. And his goal is staked higher - the goal of foretelling the rolling dice of the cosmos.
Absolute | Better | Man | Method | Nature | Philosophy | Truth | Universe | Will |
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith. We should live for the future, and yet should find our life in the fidelities of the present; the last is only the method of the first.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Faith | Future | Life | Life | Method | Present | Tomorrow |
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Perseverance | Will |
Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.
If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
Caution | Experience | Friend | Genius | Hope | Life | Life | Perseverance | Success | Wise |
There's no music in "rest," but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody, always talking of perseverance and courage and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest, too.
Courage | Fortitude | Life | Life | Melody | Music | Patience | People | Perseverance | Rest | Talking |
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. Every great discover contains an irrational element or a creative intuition.
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
One of the commonest mistakes and one of the costliest thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic - something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding one, and failure to letting go. You decide to learn a language, study music, take a course of reading, train yourself physically. Will it be success or failure? It depends upon how much pluck and perseverance that word “decide” contains. The decision that nothing can overrule, the grip that nothing can detach will bring success.
Decision | Failure | Genius | Language | Magic | Music | Nothing | Perseverance | Reading | Study | Success | Thinking | Will | Failure | Learn |
Max Weber, formally Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
To attain... self confidence, intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means. It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace.. The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole.
Character | Conduct | Confidence | Grace | Man | Means | Method | Self |
The study of history is in the truest sense an education and a training for political life... The most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.
Dignity | Education | Fortune | History | Learning | Life | Life | Method | Sense | Study | Training | Vicissitudes |