This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely.
Age | Body | Control | Education | Knowledge | Language | Memory | Time | Wisdom | Words | Work | Child |
Kindness is a language the dumb can speak, and the deaf can hear and understand.
The language of the heart which comes from the heart and goes to the heart - is always simple, graceful, and full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language, difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.
Art | Harmony | Heart | Language | Power | Rhetoric | Teach | Wisdom | Art |
If you had the seeds of pestilence in your body you would not have a more active contagion that you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.
Body | Influence | Language | Persuasion | Principles | Wisdom | World |
The mind in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.
Body | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Light | Mind | Nature | Revelation | Wisdom |
Architecture has much to teach about the art of staying married, for the basic laws of building are, likewise, the basic laws of the home. A good foundation and balanced proportion are essential. Honest materials are needed, for you cannot build a noble building out of cheap, unworthy materials and you cannot build a home to stand against the stormy winds or worries unless you build it with the simple virtues of faithfulness and loyalty to one another.
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Music is the language of praise; and one of the most essential preparations for eternity is delight in praising God; a higher acquirement, I do think, than even delight and devotedness to prayer.
Eternity | God | Language | Music | Praise | Prayer | Wisdom |
When we abandon the thought of immortality we at least have cast out fear. We gain a certain dignity and self-respect. We regard our fellow travelers as companions in the pleasures and tribulations of life... We gain kinship with the world.
Dignity | Fear | Immortality | Life | Life | Regard | Respect | Self | Thought | Tribulations | Wisdom | World | Thought |
Beliefs, desires, and intentions are a condition of language, but language is also a condition for them. On the other hand, being able to attribute beliefs and desires to a creature is certainly a condition of sharing a convention with that creature; while, if I am right... convention is not a condition of language. I suggest, then, that philosopher who make convention a necessary element in language have the matter backwards. The truth is rather that language is a condition for having conventions.
Convention | Language | Right | Truth | Wisdom |
Friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not wanting anything from him.