This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances.
Contrast | Culture | Eternal | Impossibility | Man | Nature | Poetry | Reality | Reason | Truth | Wisdom | World |
C. S. Peirce, fully Charles Sanders Peirce
The real... is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception involves the notion of an unlimited community, without definite limits and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.
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 |
Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.
Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival
Every thing existing on the physical plain is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought and in accordance with that one's responsibility at the conjunction of time, condition and place. This law of thought is Destiny. Thinking is the basic factor in shaping human destiny. The machinery of the law is nature. The purpose of the universe is to make all units of matter conscious of progressively higher degrees.
Destiny | Law | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility | Thinking | Thought | Time | Universe | Wisdom | Thought |
We are here because in this part of the universe time is trained to stop... Life cannot survive in time that flows, or while it flows. Life survives only when time stands still... So it could happen someplace, somehow, that eternity and time would meet at a golden intersection. At the very heart of the cross, where eternity and time would connect, time would stop to be blessed by eternity. And that, in fact, is our present. Consequently, the present is the very portion of time that has stopped. Life survives only in the present. The past, therefore, consists of moments during which time has previously stopped; the future, of moments during which time will subsequently stop. So here we are. We are here because in this part of the universe time stops and makes life possible. Perhaps we can imagine a time that is not lined up to intersect eternity, a time that would seem sterile to our way of thinking. In such a region of the universe, we would not be in a position to exist since our dominant features are those of life and death.
Death | Eternity | Future | Heart | Life | Life | Past | Position | Present | Thinking | Time | Universe | Will | Wisdom | Blessed |
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 |
What the world needs is a fusion of the sciences and the humanities. The humanities express the symbolic, poetic and prophetic qualities of the human spirit. Without them we would not be conscious of our history; we would lose our aspirations and the graces of expression that move men's hearts. The sciences express the creative urge in man to construct a universe which is comprehensible in terms of the human intellect. Without them, mankind would find itself bewildered in a world of natural forces beyond comprehension, victims of ignorance, superstition and fear.
Fear | History | Ignorance | Man | Mankind | Men | Qualities | Spirit | Superstition | Universe | Wisdom | World |
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life.
Art | Chance | Civilization | Contradiction | Feelings | Harmony | Imagination | Law | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Necessity | Play | Reality | Reason | Thought | Unity | Wisdom | Art | Thought |
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
The universe is one of God's thoughts.
Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart
[The earth] is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love.
Art | Birth | Death | Earth | History | Little | Love | Means | Music | Poetry | Universe | Wisdom | Art |
Since the beginning of civilization we have explained our existence in terms of what we could observe... Maybe we will discover that the only true reality is a state of mind, shaped by the information we can process and contexts in which we see it. Maybe the Supreme Being we call God can best be appreciated as the power of ultimate understanding. Maybe our destination has always been to learn and grow as we approach the light of ultimate understanding. Only the context of our ability to process information changes.
Ability | Beginning | Civilization | Existence | God | Light | Mind | Power | Reality | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | God | Learn |
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury
Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, an can only please by its resemblance. The appearance of reality is necessary to make any passion agreeably represented, and to be able to move others we must be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probably grounds.
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Not being able to enlarge the one, let us contract the other; for it is from their difference that all evils arise which render us unhappy.
Imagination | Reality | Wisdom | World |