This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Prayer is a cup held high to be filled. It is an inward quest for inspiration. It is mentally reaching out of the great thoughts and illuminations of man in his continual search for meaning.
Inspiration | Man | Meaning | Prayer | Search |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Let us leave every man free to search within himself and lose himself in his ideas.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
False wit is a fatiguing search after cunning traits, an affectation of saying in enigmas what others have already said naturally, to hang together ideas which are incompatible, to divide that which ought to be united, of seizing false relations.
Affectation | Cunning | Ideas | Search | Wit |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
Knowledge | Life | Life | Loneliness | Longing | Love | Mankind | Mockery | Pain | Pity | Poverty | Search | Suffering | World |
Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.
Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going. All of us who are mature feel that there are historic principles of behavior and morality, of things that we all believe in that are being lost, not because young people couldn't believe in them, but because there is no language for translating them into contemporary terms. The search for that language, the search for the ways to tell young people what we know as we grow older — the permanent and wonderful things about life — will be one of the great functions of this system. We are losing this generation. We all know that. We need a way to get them back.
Behavior | Language | Life | Life | Need | People | Principles | Search | Society | Will | Society |
E. O. Wilson, fully Edward Osborne "E.O." Wilson
A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
When a person feels he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make some sense of it in terms of the lives of his children. But one is bound to fail oneself and one's children. The former because the problem of existence can only be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
Man | Search | Uncertainty |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
I believe that the nature of man is a contradiction rooted in the conditions of human existence that requires a search for solutions, which in their turn create new contradictions and now the need for answers.
The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.
God | Life | Life | Personality | Search | Unique | Will | God |
As for the passions and studies of the mind: avoid envy; anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes; mirth rather than joy; variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.
Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against.
The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a tarrasse, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate.
Curiosity | Desire | Error | Glory | Knowledge | Learning | Men | Mind | Rest | Wit |
"I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us," Jean Giraudoux wrote in The Madwoman of Chaillot, "and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star."That poetic paranoia is a perfect description of what the Sun, as a gravitational lens, could do for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Gluttons no longer gorge themselves; they are simply suffering from one of a variety of eating disorders.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of Reason (which is synonymous with the Idea) when considered in its own actuality, is to simultaneously enter external existence and emerge with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases — a multiplicity that envelops its essential rational kernel with a motley outer rind with which our ordinary consciousness is earliest at home. It is this rind that the Concept must penetrate before Reason can find its own inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But this infinite variety of circumstances which is formed in this element of externality by the light of the rational essence shining in it — all this infinite material, with its regulatory laws — is not the object of philosophy....To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason.
Circumstances | Consciousness | Eternal | Existence | Light | Object | Phenomena | Reason | Wealth | Work |
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
Absolute | Change | Comfort | Compensation | Doubt | Habit | Harmony | Instinct | Intelligence | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Need | Property | Question | Quiet | Security | Society | Wealth | World | Society | Intellect | Think |