This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To approach the living question with the mind alone is impossible. The intellect must be coupled with feeling in order to stir a person to authentic inquiry. Real philosophy recognizes that ideas have sensations and emotions connected with them, and that one responds to them with the whole of oneself.
Emotions | Ideas | Inquiry | Mind | Order | Philosophy | Question | Intellect |
How are we to bring children to the spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postulated by democratic societies? By the actual practice of democracy at school. It is unbelievable that at a time when democratic ideas enter into every phase of life, they should have been so little utilized as instruments of education.
Children | Citizenship | Democracy | Education | Humanity | Ideas | Life | Life | Little | Practice | Spirit | Time |
Profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.
An open mind should be more than a catch-all receptacle. It should have a screening mechanism to keep out the trivial, a sorting capacity to organize ideas and reconcile contradictions, and a critical tool to help us decide what we believe. That’s the difference between a mind that receives information and a mind that thinks.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The fact that man is unable or unwilling to acknowledge God, means only that he cannot accept ideas and beliefs about God framed by men, the false gods which obscure the living and ineffable God.
Seven common obstacles that people seem to face in living their best lives: (1) Have difficulty putting themselves first. (2) Their schedule does not reflect their priorities. (3) They feel drained by certain people or things. (4) Feel trapped for monetary reasons. (5) Living on adrenalin. (6) Don’t have a supportive community in their life. (7) Their spiritual well-being comes last.
Difficulty | Life | Life | People |
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in the grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make sense.
Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.
Ideas | Innovation | Knowledge | Learning | Research | Theories | Time | Learn |
A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the Press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences which are at its disposal. This unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer’s receptiveness for new truth.
David J. Schwartz, fully David Joseph Schwartz
Believe Big. The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief. Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success. Remember this, too! Big ideas and big plans are often easier – certainly no more difficult – than small ideas and small plans.
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
All human history from the earliest times to our own day may be considered as a movement of consciousness both of individuals and of homogeneous groups from lower ideas to higher ones.
Consciousness | Day | History | Ideas |
Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori & Anthea Barron
When we think of the creative mind, we think of the generative mind, full of ideas and brilliant new insights. But the creative mind is both full and empty. It is able to create within itself a space for the new to arise. It is a mind that is constantly opening itself to the internal and external world.
Learning to accede to smaller demands so as not to have to grant larger ones is part of the art of leadership. The difficulty is that narrow concessions may also spread into wide ones.
Art | Difficulty | Learning | Art |
Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Hard as it is for us to escape the effects of our own feelings, nobody seems to have difficulty in rejecting the feelings of others as merely subjective and vulnerable to interference from the demons of self-deception and self-delusion.
Delusion | Difficulty | Feelings | Self | Self-deception |