This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We see facts with our eyes; we see ideas with our minds; we see ideals with our souls. Whatever we see with our souls is real and permanent and cannot be destroyed.
A friend’s only gift is himself, and friendship is not friendship, it is not a form of free or liberal society, if it does not terminate in an ideal possession, in an object loved for its own sake. Such objects can be ideas only, not forces, for forces are subterranean and instrumental things, having only such value as they borrow from their ulterior effects and manifestations... We are not to look now for what makes friendship useful, but for whatever may be found in friendship that may lend utility to life.
Friend | Ideas | Life | Life | Object | Society | Friendship | Value |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living... Warrior, jailer, priest - the eternal trinity which symbolizes our fear of life.
When young men are beginning life, the most important period, it is often said, is that in which their habits are formed. That is a very important period. But the period in which the ideas of the young are formed and adopted is more important still. For the ideal with which you go forth to measure things determines the nature, so far as you are concerned, of everything you meet.
Beginning | Ideas | Important | Life | Life | Men | Nature |
Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purpose, whether of good or of evil.
Custom | Difficulty | Energy | Evil | Good | Mind | Philosophy | Poetry | Purpose | Purpose |
Metaphysics has for the real object of its investigation three ideas only: God, Freedom and Immortality.
Freedom | God | Ideas | Immortality | Metaphysics | Object |
Reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, yet it is our own meditation that must form our judgment.
Conversation | Ideas | Judgment | Meditation | Men | Reading |
In the heat of [social] movements brains are set stirring with new ideas which live on through quieter times, waiting for another opportunity to ignite into action and change the world around us.
Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things. This is one of the chief elements in what we vaguely call capacity. If you do not dare differ from your associates and teachers you will never be great or your life sublime. You may be the happier as a result, or you may be miserable. Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us.
Associates | Bravery | Capacity | Courage | Greatness | Ideas | Life | Life | Will | Old |
The word “independence” is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word “dependence” is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption.
Corruption | Dependence | Dignity | Ideas | Inferiority | Virtue | Virtue |
There is but one pursuit in life which it is in the power of all to follow, and of all to attain. It is subject to no disappointments, since he that perseveres makes every difficulty an advancement, and every conquest a victory; and this is the pursuit of virtue. Sincerely to aspire after virtue is to gain her; and zealously to labor after her ways is to receive them.
Conquest | Difficulty | Labor | Life | Life | Power | Receive | Virtue | Virtue |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend.
Circumstances | Ideas |
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
Children | Death | Grave | Harmony | Ideas | Life | Life | Nature | Unity | Will | Blessed | Learn |
Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming... We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths.