This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it is sure to repent of every ill-judged outlay.
One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"
Better | Change | Children | Difficulty | Example | Learning | Little | Order | Perception | Society | Suspicion | Will | Wisdom | Society | Trouble | Child |
Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is most thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.
It is interesting to notice how some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage, and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles. Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear dullness to maturity; and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation.
Chance | Genius | Glory | Nature | Struggle | Will | Wisdom |
Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
Amongst all things, knowledge is truly the best thing: from its not being liable ever to be stolen, from its not being purchasable, and from its being imperishable...Learning is superior to beauty; learning is better than hidden treasure; learning is a companion on a journey to a strange country; learning is strength inexhaustible.
Beauty | Better | Journey | Knowledge | Learning | Strength | Wisdom |
It is certain that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions in which true virtue and honor consist. It very rarely happens that a man of taste and learning is not, at least, an honest man, whatever frailties may attend him.
Attention | Emotions | Frailties | Honor | Learning | Man | Taste | Temper | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
J. Z. Knight, fully Judy Zebra Knight, born Judity Darlene Hampton
Mere survival has always been the surface, bottom-line surface for our existence... Survival alone does not ennoble us... True meaning... can be found in what we’ve yet to accomplish, in the realm of the unknown. We must resolve to look deep within, at the unrealized potential of our unevolved selves. Materially, the unknown is one vast nothingness; potentially, it is all things. The unknown within us is where all dreams, thoughts and genius are frozen. The act of searching to make known the unknown triggers the brain. It allows us to incorporate, in ourselves, a greater consciousness, lighting the way for our dreams to enact themselves. Although we seem small in comparison with the whole universe, we are equipped with the greatest cosmic hookup ever created: the human brain. The brain - linked unconsciously to the infinite mind where the unknown resides - only facilitates thoughts, it does not create it. In struggling to find the answer to why we exist, we awaken the infinite mind to the unknown, making known the unknown, bringing meaning to our existence and commonness to all.
Consciousness | Dreams | Existence | Genius | Meaning | Mind | Survival | Universe | Wisdom |
D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence
What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another... Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom... The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences... the world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeonhole any idea. It can't pigeon-hole a new experience.
Experience | Fear | Freedom | Genius | Laughter | Man | Men | Wisdom | World | Old |