This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Death is the radical refutation of man’s power and a stark reminder of the necessity to relate to a meaning which lies beyond the dimension of human time. Humanity without death would be arrogance without end. Nobility has its root in humanity, and humanity derived much of its power from the thought of death.
Arrogance | Death | Humanity | Man | Meaning | Necessity | Nobility | Power | Thought | Time | Thought |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
The sage does not display himself, therefore he shines. He does not approve himself therefore he is noted. He does not praise himself, therefore he has merit. He does not glory in himself, therefore he excels.
Paul Wilhelm von Keppler, Bishop of the Diocese of Rottenburg
Joy is a constituent of life, a necessity of life; it is an element of life’s value and life’s power. As every man has need of joy, so too, every man has a right to joy… It is a condition of religious living.
Joy | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Need | Power | Right | Value |
Harold Laski, fully Harold Joseph Laski
The surest way to bring about destruction of a civilization is to allow the abyss to widen between the values men praise and the values they permit to operate.
Civilization | Men | Praise |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. It is tremendously conservative, not to say torpid. Only acute necessity is able to rouse it. The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity.
Insight | Necessity | Nothing | Personality |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
Weapons are tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.
Fear | Man | Necessity | Peace | Restraint | Weapons | Will |
The necessity of establishing some form of government [is] to supply the defect of moral virtue.
Government | Necessity | Virtue | Virtue | Government |
We have not so much the privilege of intelligence, viewed as something above and against nonhuman nature, but the responsibility and necessity to convert our intelligence to the earth. We need to learn how to use intelligence to mend the distortions we have created and how to convert intelligence into an instrument that can cultivate the harmonies and balances of the ecological community and bring these to a refinement.
Earth | Intelligence | Nature | Necessity | Need | Refinement | Responsibility | Learn | Privilege |
Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius, and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy.
Duty | Important | Justice | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Men | Praise | Reputation | Wealth | Talent |
Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
As for the necessity of coining new names for God, it is incomprehensible that philosophy and civilization can be enriched by ceasing to think of God as Life, Truth, Beauty, and Love, and beginning to think of Him as a blind and whirling space-time configuration dancing dizzily in an Einstein universe, plunging forward along a path of which He is ignorant, toward a goal of which He knows nothing whatever.
Beauty | Beginning | Civilization | God | Life | Life | Love | Necessity | Nothing | Philosophy | Space | Time | Truth | Universe | God | Think |
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. I believe that restlessness is discontent, and discontent is merely the first necessity of progress.
Discontent | Failure | Man | Necessity | Progress | Restlessness | Will |
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.