This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the whole human race... Education gives man nothing which he could not also get from within himself; it gives him that which he could get form within himself, only quicker and more easily. In the same way too, revelation gives nothing to the human race which reason could not arrive at on its own; only it has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things sooner.
Character | Education | Human race | Important | Individual | Man | Nothing | Race | Reason | Revelation |
The Divine Mind communicates with the human mind through the imagination. A prayer, therefore, should be offered in the form of a mental image. Man must visualize the thing he desires, he must use his imaginative powers to form his petition in terms clearly outlined in his own mind. The profound concentration of attention and thought which this form of prayer requires fills also the heart with deep earnestness and devotion. Man must pray whole-heartedly as well as wholemindedly; he must believe in his heart that his well-being depends completely upon his prayer.
Attention | Character | Devotion | Earnestness | Heart | Imagination | Man | Mind | Prayer | Thought | Thought |
Everything was possessed of personality, only different from us in form. Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of earth. We learned to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that was to feel beauty... Observation was certain to have its rewards. Interest, wonder, admiration grew, and the fact was appreciated that life was more than mere human manifestation; it was expressed in a multitude of forms. This appreciation enriched Lakota existence. Life was vivid and pulsating; nothing was casual and commonplace. The Indian lived - lived in every sense of the word - from his first to his last breath.
Admiration | Appreciation | Beauty | Blessings | Books | Character | Earth | Existence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Observation | Personality | Sense | Wonder | World | Appreciation |
Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through is history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are a part to be construed... Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious strutters in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resource. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition fro heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.
Character | Children | Heart | History | Man | Men | Order | Practice | Question | Right | Sense | Society | Story | Tradition | Truth | Understanding | Words | Society | Learn | Understand |
No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.
The human condition suffers from the fact that our sins and our guilt are cumulative; we may assuage, we forgive, but have no way to forget.
The greatest contribution of human value one person can make to others is by example.
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
Character | Love | Perfection | Truth | World |
Constancy is the complement of all the other human virtues.
Intelligence is kindness. Kindness is intelligence. The fundamental, which the two terms suggest in different ways... is the same quality on which all human civilization is built.
Character | Civilization | Intelligence | Kindness |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
Since man is endowed with intelligence and determines his own ends, it is up to him to put himself in tune with the ends necessarily demanded by his nature. This means that there is, by very virtue of human nature, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, is nothing more than that.
Character | Ends | Human nature | Intelligence | Law | Man | Means | Nature | Nothing | Order | Reason | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Lying is an ugly vice... Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society. It is the only instrument by means of which our wills and thoughts communicate, it is the interpreter of our soul. If it fails us, we have no more hold on each other, no more knowledge of each other. If it deceives us, it breaks up all our relations and dissolves all the bonds of our society.
Character | Knowledge | Lying | Means | Society | Soul | Ugly | Understanding | Wills | Words |