This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The seductive appeal of objective reality depends on a mistake. It is not the given. Sometimes ... the truth is not found by traveling as far away from one's personal perspective as possible.
Impulse | Mind | Objectivity | Philosophy | Principles | Question | Reality | Thinking | Understanding | Waste | Weakness | Will | Work | World | Think | Understand |
Do not give charity. Giving charity means being nice and giving away your money. But who says it is your money to begin with? It is money put in your trust, to be disbursed for good things and for others when they will need it. Change your attitude. Instead of doing what is nice, do what is right. Put the money where it belongs.
Heart | Philosophy |
To believe that God created a plurality of worlds, at least as numerous as what we call stars, renders the Christian faith at once little and ridiculous; and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air.
Authority | Humanity | Man | Philosophy |
When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Nations | Philosophy |
W. D. Joske, fully William "Bill"
The world is neutral and cannot give meaning to men, If someone wants life to be meaningful he cannot discover that meaning but must provide it himself. How we go about giving meaning to life seems to depend upon the society we accept as our own; a Frenchman might leap into the dark, an American go to a psycho-analyst, and an Englishman cease asking embarrassing questions.
Absurd | Dread | Life | Life | People | Philosophy | Afraid |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
If in spite of these facts we wish to maintain that mysticism is ultimately the source and essence of all religion, we shall have on our hands a set of problems very similar to those which beset the mystical theory of ethics. We shall have to maintain that mystical consciousness is latent in all men but is in most men submerged below the surface of consciousness. Just as it throws up into the upper consciousness influences which appear in the form of ethical feelings, so must its influences appear there in the form of religious impulses. And these in turn will give rise to the intellectual constructions which are the various creeds... The general conclusion regarding the relations between mysticism on the one hand and the area of organized religions (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) on the other is that mysticism is independent of all of them in the sense that it can exist without any of them. But mysticism and organized religion tend to be associated with each other and to become linked together because both look beyond earthly horizons to the Infinite and Eternal, and because both share the emotions appropriate to the sacred and the holy.
Absolute | Birth | Character | Consciousness | Death | Despair | Effort | Era | Faith | Individual | Influence | Man | Means | Mystical | Philosophy | Position | Power | Reality | Reason | Spirit | Struggle | Thought | Truth | Will | Wonder | Thought |
When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast, And everything else is still. ‘Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies.’ ‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, And we cannot go to sleep; Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.’ ‘Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, And then go home to bed.’ The little ones leapèd and shoutèd and laugh’d And all the hills echoèd.
Age | Doubt | Envy | Eternity | God | Gold | Good | Grave | Grief | Heaven | Hell | Innocence | Joy | Judgment | Knowledge | Light | Little | Passion | Philosophy | Public | Revenge | Right | Soul | Teach | Truth | Woe | Woman | Words | World | Worth | God | Child | Old |
Wes Nisker, fully Wes "Scoop" Nisker
"Self-liberation" is what the Buddhist path is about; it's seeing through the illusion of a separate self and that, I think, attracted us a lot because we were burdened with too much self-the land of individual license plates and special little monads of selfhood buzzing around.
Art | Enough | Good | Learning | Life | Life | Meditation | Philosophy | Reading | Understanding | Art |
Eternity appear’d above them as One Man, enfolded In Luvah’s robes of blood, and bearing all his afflictions: As the sun shines down on the misty earth, such was the Vision. But purple Night, and crimson Morning, and golden Day, descending Thro’ the clear changing atmosphere, display’d green fields among The varying clouds, like Paradises stretch’d in the expanse, With towns, and villages, and temples, tents, sheep-folds and pastures, Where dwell the children of the Elemental worlds in harmony.
Body | Genius | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Men | Method | Nations | Nature | Philosophy | Spirit |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
It makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another.
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.
Philosophy | Position | Science |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Reevaluation of some statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections — the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field.
The enquiry in England is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved.
Philosophy | Will |
Never seek to tell thy love love that never told can be; for the gentle wind does move silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; trembling, cold, in ghastly fears ah, she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me a traveler came by silently, invisibly- he took her with a sigh.
Contemplation | Darkness | Knowledge | Men | Philosophy | Tears | Words | Contemplation |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
To inquire and to create;—these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve, or at least to these objects do they all more or less directly refer.
Observation | Philosophy | Power |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that 'You can't fool all the people all the time,' but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
Philosophy | Trifles | Learn |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
In the strict formulation of the law of causality—if we know the present, we can calculate the future—it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.
Beginning | Doubt | Dynamic | Energy | Eternal | Events | Law | Materialism | Philosophy | Question | Regard | Sense | Space | Thought | Time | Will | Old | Thought |
We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish me, me, me culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground.
Computer | Ideas | Organization | Philosophy | Qualities |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
The world knows the perfect tune for harmony and peace among people. There is no secret about it. It is as old as the ages. Seers, prophets and sages have extolled it. The perfect tune is the expression of love and good will. All that is needed is that people transcend their differences so that the perfect tune may be played on the heartstrings of all people everywhere.