This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.
Mind | Order | Reality | Reason | Science | System | Universe | Vision | Wisdom |
The world of silence without speech is the world before creation, the world of unfinished creation. In silenced truth is passive and slumbering, but in language it is wide-awake. Silence is fulfilled only when speech comes forth from silence and gives it meaning and honor.
Honor | Language | Meaning | Silence | Speech | Truth | Wisdom | World |
What is in time is of a lower order than time itself: time is folded around what is in time exactly as - we read - it is folded about what is in place and in number.
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.
Culture | Ideas | Knowledge | Nature | Order | Past | Society | Will | Wisdom | World | Society |
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as the measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new and what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order into total chaos... This cannot be an easy life.
Art | Balance | Life | Life | Man | Mystery | Novelty | Order | Science | Struggle | Wisdom | Novelty | Art |
Silence is the highest wisdom of a fool as speech is the greatest trial of a wise man. If thou wouldst be known as wise, let thy words show thee so; if thou doubt thy words, let thy silence feign thee so. It is not a greater point of wisdom to discover knowledge than to hide ignorance.
Doubt | Ignorance | Knowledge | Man | Silence | Speech | Wisdom | Wise | Words | Trial |
J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine
There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics.
Dreams | Law | Man | Mind | Order | Religion | Universe | Wisdom | World |
J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine
If parapsychology deals with all the personality manifestations that are beyond explanation by physics, then by definition it should claim the entire spiritual order of reality.
Order | Personality | Reality | Wisdom |
Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.