This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
How ignorant are those who see, without question, the abstract existence of some of their senses, but insist upon doubting until that existence reveals itself to all their senses. Is not faith the sense of the heart as truly as sight is the sense of the eye?... How strange is the one who dreams in truth of a beautiful reality, and then, when he endeavours to fashion it into form but cannot succeed, doubts the dream and blasphemes the reality and distrusts the beauty!
Abstract | Beauty | Dreams | Existence | Faith | Heart | Question | Reality | Sense | Truth |
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Silence |
Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures
The game of status seeking, organized around committees, is played in roughly the same fashion in Africa and in America and in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the aptitude for this game is a part of our genetic inheritance, like the aptitude for speech and for music. The game has had profound consequences for science. In science, as in the quest for a village water supply, big projects bring enhanced status; small projects do not. In the competition for status, big projects usually win, whether or not they are scientifically justified. As the committees of academic professionals compete for power and influence, big science becomes more and more preponderant over small science. The large and fashionable squeezes out the small and unfashionable. The space shuttle squeezes out the modest and scientifically more useful expendable launcher. The Great Observatory squeezes out the Explorer. The centralized adduction system squeezes out the village well. Fortunately, the American academic system is pluralistic and chaotic enough that first-rate small science can still be done in spite of the committees. In odd corners, in out-of the-way universities, and in obscure industrial laboratories, our Fulanis are still at work.
Aptitude | Competition | Consequences | Enough | Power | Science | Space | Speech | System |
False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion interest, et cetera.
Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.
Faith | Folly | Hope | Man | Meaning | Memory | Myth | Words |
As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.
Technological possibilities are an uncharted sea. We may survey a geographical region and appraise…that the best plots are first taken into cultivation, after them the next best ones and so on. At any given time during this process it is only relatively inferior plots that remain to be exploited in the future. But we cannot reason in this fashion about the future possibilities of technological advance. From the fact that some of them have been exploited before others, it cannot be inferred that the former were more productive than the latter. And those that are still in the lap of the gods may be more or less productive than any that have thus far come within our range of observation….There is no reason to expect slackening of the rate of output through exhaustion of technological possibilities.
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
There is arguably no more important and pressing topic than the relation of science and religion in the modern world. Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. Truth and meaning, science and religion; but we still cannot figure out how to get the two of them together in a fashion that both find acceptable.
The world isn't purposeful. It isn't ruled by reason. The world wants to play. Fashion queens have always aroused more interest than future generations and their fate.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
The religion of the flag promptly replaced the cult of heaven, an old cloud which had already been deflated by the Reformation and reduced to a network of episcopal money boxes. In olden times the fanatical fashion was: 'Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics!' . . . But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary . . . Whereas today vast hordes of men are fired with aim and purpose by cries of ‘Hang the limp turnips! The juiceless lemons! The innocent readers! By the millions, eyes right!’ If anybody doesn’t want to fight or murder, grab ‘em, tear ‘em to pieces! Kill them in thirteen juicy ways. For a starter, to teach them how to live, rip their guts out of their bodies, their eyes out of their sockets, and the years out of their filthy slobbering lives!
Cult | Kill | Men | Money | Purpose | Purpose | Religion | Teach | Old |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
Maria Von Ebner-Eschenbach, or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachová, Marie Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
As soon as fashion is universal, it is out of date.
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best -- out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
‘In the future to come…“a New Torah will come forth from Me.” At that time there will also be the revelation of Divinity in the world, in ultimate completion and without any concealment at all, as it says, “the glory of God shall be revealed and all flesh shall see together for the mouth of God has spoken.” For it will be seen in a revealed fashion that the existence of “all flesh” [that is, physicality] is the Godly power that brings it into being ex-nihilo [out of no-thing], the power of Atzmuss, and consequently there is no difference between higher and lower, since they are One…’
Concealment | Divinity | Existence | Future | Glory | God | Power | Revelation | Time | Will | God | Torah |
What is man? A creature of dust; a thing of transience whose days fly by faster than a weaver's shuttle; a fragile being crushed sooner than a moth; a body, sustaining and reproducing itself after the fashion of the beast; a vessel filled with shame and confusion, impelled by pride and self-love, driven by passions.
Pride | Shame | Transience |
Murray D. Lincoln, fully Murray Danforth Lincoln
People have within their own hands the tools to fashion their own destiny.
Down the millennia of its existence, Hinduism has made a priceless contribution to the collective religious life of mankind through the remarkable findings of her many brilliant mystics and philosophers, as set forth in a voluminous literature. Perhaps, however, her most significant contribution to the universal body of religious inquiry is the persistent, unshakable belief that union with the Divine is attainable while one is still on earth. Moreover, any man in India is at liberty to pursue salvation after his own fashion with no danger of finding himself at some point branded as heretic. Indeed, heresy in Hinduism is virtually impossible, for as the authoritative Upanishads firmly state: “Reality of One though sages call it by different names.
Belief | Body | Danger | Inquiry | Liberty | Life | Life | Man | Mankind | Salvation | Danger |
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
Industry |