This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Edmund Husserl, fully Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl
Cognition is, after all, only human cognition, bound up with human intellectual forms, and unfit to reach the very nature of things, to reach things in themselves.
Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolutely unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.
Death | Life | Life | Little | Means | Mind | Nothing | Play | Smile | Sorrow | Waiting | Wisdom | Old | Think |
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Judging only by outer appearances is a mistake, because things are rarely what they seem... Disapproval of a person is disapproval of God. There is a great difference between being judgmental and using good judgment. You have to love each person’s divine essence, but you do not have to like someone’s inappropriate behavior. Wrong judgment impedes your spiritual growth.
Behavior | God | Good | Growth | Judgment | Love | Mistake | Wisdom | Wrong |
The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world formula or that world formula be the true one.
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
Excess | Extravagance | Man | Wisdom |
There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again.
Wisdom |
If at any time all labor should cease, and all existing provision be equally divided among the people, at the end of a single year there could scarcely be one human being left alive - all would have perished by want of subsistence... Universal idleness would speedily result in universal ruin; and ... useless labor is, in this respect, the same as idleness.
This divination of the spiritual in the things of sense, and which expresses itself I the things of sense, is precisely what we call Poetry. Metaphysics too pursues a spiritual prey, but in a very different formal object. Whereas metaphysics stands in the line of knowledge and of the contemplation of truth, poetry stands in the line of making and of the delight procured by beauty. The difference is an all-important one, and one that it would be harmful to disregard. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence... Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order. Metaphysics isolates mystery in order to know it; poetry, thanks to the balances it constructs, handles and utilizes mystery as an unknown force.
Abstract | Beauty | Contemplation | Existence | Force | Important | Intelligence | Knowledge | Metaphysics | Mystery | Object | Order | Poetry | Reflection | Sense | Truth | Wisdom | Contemplation |
Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction.
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Consideration | Labor | Wisdom |
Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.