This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Enthusiasm is the element of success in everything. It is the light that leads and the strength that lifts men on and up in the great struggles of scientific pursuits and of professional labor. It robs endurance of difficulty, and makes a pleasure of duty.
Difficulty | Duty | Endurance | Enthusiasm | Labor | Light | Men | Pleasure | Strength | Success | Wisdom |
Georges Duhamel, Pen name Denis Thevenin
Great ideas have such radiant strength. They cross space and time like avalanches: they carry along with them whatever they touch. They are the only riches that one shares without ever dividing them.
Ideas | Riches | Space | Strength | Time | Wisdom | Riches |
There are three reasons why, quite apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first reason is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second reason is to escape material impoverishment; the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forgo forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third reason is our spiritual need for an open frontier. The ultimate purpose of space travel is to bring to humanity, not only scientific discoveries and an occasional spectacular show on television, but a real expansion of our spirit.
Abundance | Earth | Energy | Humanity | Mankind | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Space | Spirit | Television | Wisdom |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Hatred is like fire - it makes even light rubbish deadly.
Noël du Fail, Seigneur de La Hérissaye
The candle which goes before gives more light than the one which comes behind.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
In the light of eternity we shall see that what we desired would have been fatal to us, and that what we would have avoided was essential to our well-being.
To regard teachers - in our entire educational system from the primary grades to the university - as priests of our democracy is therefore not to indulge in hyperbole. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion.
Democracy | Inquiry | Opinion | Public | Regard | System | Wisdom |
This should not come as a surprise, for indeed ‘out there’ there is no light and no colour, and there are only electromagnetic waves; ‘out there’ there is no sound and no music, there are only periodic variations of the air pressure; ‘out there’ there is no heat and no cold, there are only moving molecules with more or less mean kinetic energy, and so on. Finally, for sure, ‘out there’ there is no pain.
We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been at the repression of faults rather than creation of virtues.
Earth | Education | Objectives | Public | System | Wisdom | Trouble |
I believe in the dignity of being and, even more so, of becoming... Death may not be an end but only a passage, a dimensional leap. And what if, once free of the slavery of three and four dimensions, once released from space and time, we were to discover unimaginable realities beyond our poor five senses?
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
George Gissing, fully George Robert Gissing
It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience.
Children | Day | Experience | Familiarity | Life | Life | Time | Wisdom |