This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great. Now don't misunderstand me. I recognize that this merely great person, as distinguished from the genius, will not be able to bridge from field to field. He will not have the ideas that shorten the solution of problems by hundreds of years. He will not suddenly say that mass is energy, that is genius. But within his own field he will make things grow and flourish; he will grow happy helping other people in his field, and to that field he will add things that would not have been added, had he not come along.
When we meet with difficulties, become anxious or troubled, let us not blame others, but rather ourselves, that is: our ideas about things.
Opportunity ideas do not lie around waiting to be discovered. Such ideas need to be produced.
Let us therefore conclude that there are no ideas but such as are acquired: the first proceed immediately from the senses; the others are owing to experience, and increase in proportion as we become capable of reflecting.
Ideas |
The connexion of ideas can arise from no other cause, than from the attention given to them, when they presented themselves conjunctly to our minds.
Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.
Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics. Here we find ideas of moral wrong and moral right associated with something else than beneficial action. The consequent is, we lose sight of the real basis of morals, and substitute a false one.
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties.
Ideas |
French National Assembly - Declaration of the Rights of Man NULL
The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow.
The impermanence of all forms is the starting point of Buddhism. The Buddha taught that ‘all compounded things are impermanent’, and that all suffering in the world arises from our trying to cling to fixed forms - objects, people or ideas - instead of accepting the world as it moves and changes.
Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.
Gilbert Seldes, fully Gilbert Vivian Seldes
All great ideas are controversial, or have been at one time.
Ideas |
Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.