This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee; all chance, direction, which thou canst not see; all discord harmony, not understood; all partial evil, universal good: and, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, one truth is clear, “Whatever is, is Right.”
Art | Chance | Evil | Good | Harmony | Nature | Pride | Reason | Right | Truth | Wisdom |
Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the loftiest kind thereof comes only of a religious stock - from consciousness of obligation and dependence upon God.
Character | Consciousness | Dependence | God | Indispensable | Obligation | Self | Self-denial | Wisdom |
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.
Culture | Ideas | Knowledge | Nature | Order | Past | Society | Will | Wisdom | World | Society |
Human nature craves novelty.
Human nature | Nature | Novelty | Wisdom |
Hasty resolutions are of the nature of vows; and to be equally avoided.
Conservation is the application of common sense to the common problems for the common good. since its objective is the ownership, control, development, processing, distribution, and use of the natural resources for the benefit of the people, it is by its very nature the antithesis of monopoly.
Antithesis | Common Sense | Conservation | Control | Good | Nature | People | Problems | Sense | Wisdom |
This whole striving for brotherhood is somehow in the very nature of things. Once you affirm it, you're in the stream of existence.
Brotherhood | Existence | Nature | Wisdom |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
In dealing with the environment we must learn now how to master nature but how to master ourselves, our institutions, and our technology.
Nature | Technology | Wisdom | Learn |
The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The rules of navigation never navigated a ship; the rules of architecture never built a house.
Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds
You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency... Assiduity... will produce effects similar to those which some call the result of natural powers.
Dependence | Genius | Industry | Will | Wisdom |
Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language.
Language | Man | Nature | Understanding | Wisdom |
Edmond Rostand, fully Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun has been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.
The great inequality in manner of living, the extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labor of others, the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion, and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad as it is, insufficient for their needs, which induces them, when opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their stomachs; all these, together with sitting up late, and excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental exhaustion, the innumerable pains and anxieties inseparable from every condition of life, by which the mind of man is incessantly tormented; these are too fatal proofs that the greater part of our ills are our own making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed.
Extreme | Idleness | Indigestion | Inequality | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nature | Opportunity | Passion | Wisdom |
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life.
Art | Chance | Civilization | Contradiction | Feelings | Harmony | Imagination | Law | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Necessity | Play | Reality | Reason | Thought | Unity | Wisdom | Art | Thought |