This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.
Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded by experience.
Experience | Need | Study |
François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
Be not afraid of enthusiasm; you need it; you can do nothing effectually without it.
Enthusiasm | Need | Nothing | Afraid |
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.
Cunning | Little | Man | Memory | Need | Present | Reading | Wit | Writing |
No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.
He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven.
To lay aside all prejudice is to lay aside all principles. He who is destitute of principles is governed, theoretically and practically, by whims.
Prejudice | Principles |
Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo
The knowledge of a single fact acquired through a discovery of its causes prepares the mind to understand and ascertain other facts without need of recourse to experiment.
Discovery | Experiment | Knowledge | Mind | Need | Discovery | Understand |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a world all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit - it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit.
Earth | Eternal | Existence | Heaven | Important | Man | Mind | Need | Spirit | World | Absurdity | Truths |
The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money.
Better | Culture | Enough | Grace | Liberty | Love | Money | Need | Redemption |
Haven’t you noticed that people always exaggerate the value of things they haven’t got? The poor think they need nothing but riches to be quite happy and good. Everybody worships truth, purity, unselfishness, for the same reason: because they have no experience of them. Oh, if they only knew!
Experience | Good | Happy | Need | Nothing | People | Purity | Reason | Riches | Truth | Riches | Think | Value |
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.
Need | Philosophy |
We need not fear the expression of ideas-we do need to fear their suppression.
Fear | Ideas | Need | Suppression |
There is a sphere where the enthusiasm of love is the calm habit of the soul, that without words, without the demonstrations of affection, heart beats to heart, soul answers soul, we respond to the Infinite Love, and we feel his answer in us, and there is no need of words.
A case might be made for the potentiality superior humor of the religious person who has settled once and for all what things are of ultimate value, sacred and untouchable. For then nothing else in the world need be taken seriously.