This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Obscurity and a competence - that is the life that is best worth living.
Character | Competence | Life | Life | Obscurity | Obscurity | Worth |
Cardinal de Bernis Francois-Joachim de Piere de Bernis
To be a wit, intelligence is enough; to be a poet takes imagination.
Enough | Imagination | Intelligence | Wisdom | Wit |
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
Providence is the very divine reason which arranges all things, and rests with the supreme disposer of all; while fate is that ordering which is a part of all changeable things, and by means of which Providence binds all things together in their own order. Providence embraces all things equally, however different they may be, even however infinite: when they are assigned to their own places, forms, and times, Fate sets them in an orderly motion; so that this development of the temporal order, unified in the intelligence of the mind of God, is Providence. The working of this unified development in time is called Fate. These are different, but the one hangs upon the other. For this order, which is ruled by Fate, emanates from the directness of Providence.
Fate | God | Intelligence | Means | Mind | Order | Providence | Reason | Time | Wisdom | Fate |
As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence to go with them.
Health | Intelligence | Wisdom |
Allan Chalmers, fully Allan Knight Chalmers
The only popularity worth aspiring after, is the popularity of the heart - the popularity that is won in the bosom of families, and at the side of death beds.
Death | Heart | Popularity | Wisdom | Worth |
And all your dreams and other such like folly, to deep oblivion let them be consigned; for they arise but from your melancholy, by which your health is being undermined. A straw for all the meaning you can find in dreams! They aren’t worth a hill of beans, for no one knows what dreaming really means.
Dreams | Folly | Health | Meaning | Means | Melancholy | Oblivion | Wisdom | Worth |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Progress begins with the minority. It is completed by persuading the majority, by showing the reason and the advantage of the step forward, and that is accomplished by appealing to the intelligence of the majority.
Intelligence | Majority | Progress | Reason | Wisdom |
For the highest task of intelligence is to grasp and recognize genuine opportunity, possibility.
Intelligence | Opportunity | Wisdom |