This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The answer to [our social problems] lies in democratic free thought where ideas may be generated, challenged, and accepted or rejected on the basis of scientific examination and verification, and evaluated on the basis of the highest human values that emerge from the developing society.
Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel
A library is thought in cold storage.
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
Action | Inspiration |
We are by nature thinking beings, and if we cannot escape anxiety about the inherent structure of our thought processes, how can we hope to creative purposive ideals that are congruent with reality instead of deflecting us from it?
Anxiety | Anxiety | Hope | Ideals | Nature | Reality | Thinking | Thought | Thought |
Men who have no property can injure one another only in their persons or reputations. But when one man kills, wounds, beats, or defames another, thought he to whom the injury is done suffers, he who does it receives no benefit. It is otherwise with the injuries to property. The benefit of the person who does the injury is often equal to the loss of him who suffers.
Every thought is a prayer. Every thought that we think is like an order that we place with God, who is prepared to give us all that we ask for in the form of our thoughts. The more we dwell on any thought, the more likely we are to see that thought manifested in our experience.
Experience | God | Order | Prayer | Thought | Think | Thought |
Philosophy begins in wonder, and at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Philosophy | Thought | Wonder | Thought |
Know what work you want to do and go after it. The young man who gets ahead must decide for himself what he wishes to do. From his own tastes, his own enthusiasm, how he must get the motive and the inspiration which are to start him on his way to a successful life.
Enthusiasm | Inspiration | Life | Life | Man | Wishes | Work |
In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation.
Beauty | Body | Civilization | Error | Existence | Important | Man | Mind | Organic | Pleasure | Reality | Science | Sorrow | Soul | Thought | Thought |
The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady action. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider - and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation, - preserving in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree.
Action | Better | Man | Men | Mind | Success | Thought | Thought |
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Philosophy | Thought | Wonder | Thought |
Giving much thought to the future is vain. Only one task is worthy of the doing and that is to express the Here and Now. And to express means building, out of the infinite diversity of the Here and Now, a visage dominating it. It means shaping silence out of stones. Any other claim is but an ado of words that weave the wind.
Diversity | Future | Giving | Means | Silence | Thought | Words | Thought |
The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish. But desire is consequent of opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the starting-point.
Appetite | Desire | Good | Object | Opinion | Thinking | Thought | Thought |