This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Language was a long time without having any other words than the names which had been given to sensible objects, such as these, tree, fruit, water, fire, and others, which they had more frequent occasion to mention.
Distinguish | Fear | Ideas | Metaphysics | Reason |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
So we must try to distinguish between two questions that are often confused in this discussion. Is the existence of God a truth demonstrable by natural reason, so that it is knowable and known with certitude? Without a doubt the answer to this first question is “yes.” The second question is whether everyone can consider his natural reason infallible in its effort to demonstrate rationally the existence of God? The merciless criticism of the proofs of St. Augustine, St. Anselm, Descartes, Malebranche and many others are timely reminders of the need for modesty. Are we keener philosophers than they? That is the whole question. Modesty is not skepticism. So we should not be afraid to let our mind pursue the proof of God’s existence until we reach the greatest possible certitude, but we should keep intact our faith in the word that reveals this truth to the most simple folk as well as to the most learned. Here it is well to meditate on the very complex and nuanced passage in ST 2-2.2.4: “Is it necessary to believe what can be proved by natural reason?” The answer is in the affirmative: “We must accept by faith not only what is above reason but also what can be known by reason.”
Beginning | Body | Experience | Giving | Life | Life | Looks | Philosophy | Wisdom | Learn |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.
Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |
Our inquiries are sometimes more difficult, in proportion as the object of them is more simple. Our very perceptions are an instance of this. What is more easy in appearance than to determine whether the soul takes notice of all those perceptions by which it is affected? Need there anything more than to reflect on one's self? Doubtless all philosophers have done it.
Ideas |
And yet it is not always in our power to revive the perceptions we have felt. On some occasions the most we can do is by recalling to mind their names, to recollect some of the circumstances atr tending them, and an abstract idea of perception; an idea which we are capable of framing every instant, because we never think without being conscious of some perception which it depends on ourselves, to render genera).
Happy | Ideas | Imagination | Men | Reason |
Theology is about God, and God is Spirit … we have accumulated a lot of experience in the Christian community of persons treating theology as a subject in which God is studied in the ways we are taught to study in our schools—acquiring information that we can use, or satisfying our curiosity, or obtaining qualifications for a job or profession. There are, in fact, a lot of people within and outside formal religious settings who talk and write a lot about spirituality, things of the spirit or the soul or higher things, but are not interested in God. There is a wonderful line in T. H. White’s novel of King Arthur (The Once and Future King), in which Guinevere in her old age becomes the abbess of a convent: ‘she was a wonderful theologian but she wasn’t interested in God.’ It happens.
Children | God | Liberty | People | Rhetoric | Service | Wisdom | Work | Instruction | God |
Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Integrity | Man | Men | Relationship | Responsibility | Title | Wisdom |
The language of song or vocal music is not so familiar to us, as it was to the ancients'; and that of mere instrumental performance has no longer the air of novelty, which alone has so great an effect upon the imagination.
To produce harmony, the cadences ought not to be placed indifferently. Sometimes the harmony ought to be suspended, and at other times it ought to terminate with a sensible pause. Consequently in a language, whose prosody is perfect, the succession of sounds should be subordinate to the fall of each period, so that the cadences shall be more or less abrupt, and the ear shall not find a final pause, till the mind be entirely satisfied.
Government | Ideas | Order | Government |
Hence comes to man the more sustainable the enjoyment of his heart, the pleasure of melancholy, this charming full of secrets, that the fact live in his pain and s' love yet in the sense of its ruin?
Wisdom |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
Children | Experience | Wisdom | Old |
Enjoy, there is no other wisdom do enjoy your similar, there is no other virtue.
Wisdom |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.
Wisdom |
How different from this manner of education is that which prevails in our own country, where nothing is more usual than to see forty or fifty boys of several ages, tempers, and inclinations, ranged together in the same class, employed upon the same authors, and enjoined the same tasks! Whatever their natural genius may be, they are all to be made poets, historians, and orators alike. They are all obliged to have the same capacity, to bring in the same tale of verse, and to furnish out the same amount of prose. Everybody is bound to have as good a memory as the captain of the form. To be brief, instead of adapting studies to the particular genius of a youth, we expect from the young man that he should adapt his genius to his studies. This, I must confess, is not so much to be imputed to the instructor, as to the parent, who will never be brought to believe that his son is not capable of performing as much as his neighborÂ’s, and that he may not make him whatever he has a mind to.
Today's today. Tomorrow we may be ourselves gone down the drain of Eternity.
Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
He was talking very excitedly to me, said the Vicar, about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.
Instinct | Self-preservation | Wisdom |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.
Absurd | Distinction | Effort | Excitement | Growth | Ideas | Inevitable | Life | Life | Men | Organic | People | Right | Think |