This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist—a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.
Evidence | Learning | Mathematics | Talking |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
Children want to know things, they want to do things. Teachers do not have to put life into them: the life is there, waiting for an outlet. All that is needed is to preserve and to direct its flow.
Better | Business | Children | Life | Life | Mathematics | Business |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
Children live in the present. They feel that at any moment something tremendously exciting may happen. Successful teaching makes them feel that something tremendously exciting has happened. Preparation for the business worries of adult life does not meet this specification. Mathematics teaching is practical and purposeful only if it enables children to do better something they desperately want to do here and now.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The appeal of arithmetic to infants is usually self-evident and recognising unusual mathematical maturity is not difficult. The unjustified fears of some educationists about allowing children to forge ahead, needs discussion and recognition of the need for young mathematicians to work in depth and at speed.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
I enjoyed the mathematics that I had time to learn. If I ever need or want to learn some more, I shall not be afraid to do so.
Crime | Energy | Force | Fulfillment | Good | Important | Individual | Learning | Little | Means | Sense | Society | Will | Wishes | Society |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The essential quality for a mathematician is the habit of thinking things out for oneself. That habit is usually acquired in childhood. It is hard to acquire it later.
Adaptability | Education | Individual | Learning | Mind | Practice | Resentment | Skill |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The religion of one age is often the poetry of the next. Around every living and operative faith there lies a region of allegory and of imagination into which opinions frequently pass, and in which they long retain a transfigured and idealised existence after their natural life has died away. They are, as it were, deflected. They no longer tell directly and forcibly upon human actions. They no longer produce terror, inspire hopes, awake passions, or mould the characters of men; yet they still exercise a kind of reflex influence, and form part of the ornamental culture of the age. They are turned into allegories. They are interpreted in a non-natural sense. They are invested with a fanciful, poetic, but most attractive garb. They follow instead of controlling the current of thought, and being transformed by far-fetched and ingenious explanations, they become the embellishments of systems of belief that are wholly irreconcilable with their original tendencies. The gods of heathenism were thus translated from the sphere of religion to the sphere of poetry. The grotesque legends and the harsh doctrines of a superstitious faith are so explained away, that they appear graceful myths foreshadowing and illustrating the conceptions of a brighter day. For a time they flicker upon the horizon with a softly beautiful light that enchants the poet, and lends a charm to the new system with which they are made to blend; but at last this too fades away. Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays, possessing little heat, are expended in creating beauty.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
We may not lay much stress on such isolated instances of depravity as that of Pope John XXII, who was condemned, among many other crimes, for incest and adultery; or the abbot-elect of St Augustine, at Canterbury, who in 1171 was found, on investigation, to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village; or an abbot of St Pelayo, in Spain, who in 1130 was proved to have kept no less than seventy concubines; or Henry III, bishop of Liege, who was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children; but it is impossible to resist the evidence of a long chain of Councils and ecclesiastical writers, who conspire in depicting far greater evils than simple concubinage.... The writers of the middle ages are full of accounts of nunneries that were like brothels, of the vast multitude of infanticides within their walls, and of that inveterate prevalence of incest among the clergy, which rendered it necessary again and again to issue the most stringent enactments that priests should not be permitted to live with their mothers or sisters.
Attention | Individual | Mind | Persuasion | Practice | Time | Old |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
It is clear that a great increase in the quality of life would occur if we could improve the teacher-pupil ratio. In the present economic climate of the world, such an aspiration appears hopeless. However, most official economic thinking relates to an age long dead. It is concerned with greater efficiency of production. But it was evident in 1930, and is still more evident in the age of the micro-chip, that the problem is not to produce but to distribute. The main social problem is to keep people occupied; the main economic problem is to spread incomes so that people who need things can afford to buy them.
Learning | Understand |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Of course, we need not be surprised if artistic excellence goes unrecognized on account of being unknown; but there should be the greatest indignation when, as often, good judges are flattered by the charm of social entertainments into an approbation which is a mere a pretense.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Architects should be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
All the gifts which fortune bestows she can easily take away; but education, when combined with intelligence, never fails, but abides steadily on to the very end of life.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The intellectuals who are accustomed to serving the capitalists and the capitalist state say in order to console themselves: You cannot do without us. But their insolent assumption has no truth in it; educated men are already making their appearance on the side of the people, on the side of the working people, and are helping to break the resistance of the servants of capital.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved. But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century — as in the age of civilization generally — violence means neither a fist nor a club, but troops. To put “disarmament” in the program is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!
Mind |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
If the Congress was a struggle between the Iskra-ist and the anti-Iskra-ist elements, were there no intermediate, unstable elements who vacillated between the two? Anyone at all familiar with our Party and with the picture generally presented by congresses of every kind will be inclined a priori to answer the question in the affirmative.
People |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-colored kins, 'thin arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, big bright mouth_; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
Art | Impression | Lesson | Magic | Pleasure | Present | Unique | Art |