This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Metaphysically, the world has three levels: physical, spiritual and mystical. We find life’s meaning at each level. What gives life meaning is sharing - sharing bread, babies, moments, death, celebrations. It is recognizing that there is no separation between human beings or between human beings and the evolution of the world. Subconsciously and consciously, we are constantly expressing the fact that we are divine.
Death | Evolution | Life | Life | Meaning | Mystical | Wisdom | World |
James Fitzjames Stephen, fully Sir James Fitzjames Stephen
Wisdom may be the ultimate arbiter, but is seldom the immediate agent in human affairs.
Wisdom |
Terence, full Latin name Publius Terentius Afer NULL
I am a human being; no part of humanity do I consider foreign to me.
The golden thread in the mind of man is the light that leads towards excellence as a human objective. If perfection is a divine attribute, excellence is a human incentive and a healthy aim, even when we fall short of the target.
Excellence | Light | Man | Mind | Perfection | Wisdom | Excellence |
Human wisdom is the aggregate of all human experience, constantly accumulating, selecting and reorganizing its own materials.
Experience | Wisdom |
It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by successive generations of men, the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up and growing at length into a mighty pyramid.
Art | Business | Experience | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Men | Observation | Science | Success | Wisdom |
The child represents spontaneity and freshness, the deep urge of the human soul to explore its vast, unlimited territories. Our psyche always years to explore its fullness, and the child embodies that inner urge to break the boundaries of the known to explore the new, the fresh.
David Swing, aka Professor Swing
Ethics is the science of human duty. Arithmetic tells man how to count his money; ethics how he should acquire it, whether by honesty or fraud. Geography is a map of the world; ethics is a beautiful map of duty. This ethics is not Christianity, it is not even religion; but it is the sister of religion, because the path of duty is in full harmony, as to quality and direction, with the path of God.
Duty | Ethics | Fraud | God | Harmony | Honesty | Man | Money | Religion | Science | Wisdom | World |
The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition, or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
Destroy | Enjoyment | Excellence | Imagination | Improvement | Man | Mind | Past | Present | Will | Wisdom |
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
All things human change.
Elizabeth Stoddard, fully Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, née Barstow
Never does the soul feel so far from human life as when a man finds himself alone in the vistas of the moon, either in the streets of a sleeping city, the avenues of the woods, or by the border of the sea.
Faith, love and sorrow are three elements that mysteriously blend in human experience, each having its own tale to tell of the relation which we bear to the Supreme Being.
Experience | Faith | Love | Sorrow | Wisdom |
Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe
A species does not live within its environment; it interacts with it. Over a period of time a species can interact so violently that the changes it catalyzes can cause it to change dramatically--even to die out. Scientists estimate that 90% of the life forms that have inhabited our planet are now extinct. From the earliest single-cell life form to the human animal, all have interacted with the environment. All have created problems for themselves. All have been agents of evolutionary change. All have experienced evolution through cataclysm.
Cause | Change | Evolution | Life | Life | Problems | Time | Wisdom |