This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
Children | Experience | Experiment | Order | Taste | Wisdom |
Caroline Leigh Smith Gascoigne
An error gracefully acknowledged is a victory won.
James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield
It is one of the many paradoxes of psychology that the pursuit of happiness defeats its own purpose. We find happiness only when we do not directly seek it. An analogy will make this clear. In listening to music at a concert, we experience pleasurable feelings only so long as our attention is directed towards the music. But if in order to increase our happiness we give all our attention to our subjective feeling of happiness, it vanishes. Nature contrives to make it impossible for anyone to attain happiness by turning into himself.
Attention | Experience | Feelings | Listening | Music | Nature | Order | Psychology | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
Experience | Life | Life | Wisdom |
Never let your love for your profession overshadow your religious feeling. Depend on it that religion will strengthen, not weaken, your energies, and will not only make you a better sailor, but a superior man. Professional studies are not to be neglected; but, on the other hand, take care how you fall into the common error of believing they are the remedy for all the ills of life.
Better | Care | Error | Life | Life | Love | Man | Religion | Will | Wisdom |
It is often the scientist’s experience that he senses the nearness of truth when... connections are envisioned. A connection is a step toward simplification, unification. Simplicity is indeed often the sign of truth and a criterion of beauty.
Beauty | Experience | Simplicity | Truth | Wisdom |
Leisure is the mother of philosophy... The source of every crime , is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions... And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Crime | Error | Force | Leisure | Life | Life | Man | Mother | Philosophy | Understanding | Wisdom |
Each experience through which we pass operates ultimately for our good. This is a correct attitude to adopt and we must be able to see it in that light.
Experience | Good | Light | Wisdom |
Anthony Hope, fully Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins
Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction.
Experience | Understanding | Wisdom |
We all know the impression of a heavy flash of lightning in the night. Within a second's time we see a broad landscape, not only in its general outlines but with every detail. Although we could never describe each single component of the picture [Sign-mind task], we feel that not even the smallest leaf of grass escapes our attention. We experience a view, immensely comprehensive and at the same time immensely detailed, that we could never have under normal daylight conditions, if our senses and nerves were not strained by the extraordinary suddenness of the event. Compositions must be conceived in the same way.
Attention | Experience | Impression | Mind | Time | Wisdom |
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Error | Government | Truth | Wisdom |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
The function of religion is to protect us from an experience of God. [paraphrased]
Experience | God | Religion | Wisdom |
The world of our consciousness consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous - the cosmic times and spaces, for example - whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of the mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one.
Consciousness | Example | Existence | Experience | Mind | Reality | Thinking | Time | Wisdom | World | Think |