This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect.
Ability | Authority | Design | Judgment | Knowledge | Men | Object | Position | Practice | Principles | Skill | Study | Theories | Work | Child |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Men who look for happiness are like drunkards who cannot find their house but know that they have one.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
Affectation | Business | Famous | Genius | Good | Need | Posterity | Sincerity | Skill | Will | Business |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Not getting depressed, frustrated or dejected is the basis for all prosperity and happiness. Giving up one’s life produces nothing good, to continue to live is the way to joy and happiness.
God is always present and always working towards the life of the soul and its deliverance from captivity under flesh and blood. But this inward work of God, though never ceasing or altering, is yet always and only hindered by the activity of our own nature and faculties, by bad men through their obedience to earthly passions and by good men through their striving to be good in their own way, by their natural strength and a multiplicity of holy labors and contrivances. Both these sorts of people obstruct the work of God upon their souls. For we can cooperate with God no other way than by submitting to the work of God, and seeking, and leaving ourselves to it.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Skill |
There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does.
Science has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying, everything except itself. It has made possible the tremendous modern development of power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of human effort as to make the differences from the past seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself very imperfectly. Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply to success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general staff work to apply them; that the difference between a mob and an army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human nature; that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline.
Art | Opinion | Order | Patience | People | Skill | Study | Sympathy | Will | Wishes | Art | Learn |