This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception.
Belief | Cause | Common Sense | Memory | Pain | Perception | Power | Sense | Thought | Wisdom | Absurdity | Think | Thought |
Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
If you wish to be like the gods on earth, to be free in the realms of the dead, pluck not the fruit from the garden! In appearance it may glisten to the eye; but the perishable pleasure of possession quickly avenges the curse of curiosity.
Appearance | Curiosity | Earth | Pleasure | Wisdom |
There is no greater unreasonableness in the world than in the designs of ambition; for it makes the present certainly miserable, unsatisfactory, troublesome, and discontented, for the uncertain acquisition of an honor which nothing can secure; and, besides a thousand possibilities of miscarrying, it relies upon no greater certainty than our life; and when we are dead all the world sees who was the fool.
Ambition | Honor | Life | Life | Nothing | Present | Wisdom | World |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasure activity.
Aspiration | Fortune | Joy | Pleasure | Wisdom | Aspiration |
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
Whatever pain or problem we have, it helps us find a quality of presence - where we can open to it, see it, feel it, and find the truth concealed in it - that is our healing.
The best definition of wealth - the only true definition, I think - is the possession of whatever gives us happiness, contentment or a sense of one's significance in the scheme of things.
Contentment | Sense | Wealth | Wisdom | Think |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
When a child begins to move in the midst of the objects that surround him, he is instinctively led to appropriate to himself everything that he can lay his hands upon; he has no notion of the property of others; but as he gradually learns the value of things and begins to perceive that he may in his turn be despoiled, he becomes more circumspect, and he ends by respecting those rights in others which he wishes to have respected in himself. The principle which the child derives from the possession of his toys is taught to the man by the objects which he may call his own.
Ends | Man | Property | Rights | Wisdom | Wishes | Child | Value |
Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
It required the Great Depression to open the eyes of the American people to the economic, cultural, social, political, and spiritual values inherent in a great democracy. For this I am thankful. As a distinctly finite being, man learns only through tragic experiences. Progress and Pain are Siamese twins.
Democracy | Depression | Man | Pain | People | Progress | Wisdom |
If you've got pain and you've got hope, you've got a lot going for you.