This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In all change of appearances substance is permanent; its quantum in nature is neither increased nor diminished.
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
There are at bottom but two possible religions - that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.
Man | Nature | Observation | Universe |
Philosophy must then assume that no real contradiction will be found between freedom and physical necessity of the same human actions, for it cannot give up the conception of nature any more than that of freedom.
Contradiction | Freedom | Nature | Necessity | Philosophy | Will |
Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
It has been my experience that people who are at cross-purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves.
Experience | Mankind | Nature | People |
We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.
Civilization | Commitment | Confidence | Future | Imagination | Man | Nature | World | Engagement | Afraid |
No one, it is true, will be able to boast that he knows that he knows there is a God and a future life; for, it he knows this, he is just the man whom I have long wished to find... My conviction is not logical, but moral certainty; and since it rests on subjective grounds (of the moral sentiment), I must not even say: It is morally certain that there is a God, etc., but: I am morally certain, that is, my belief in God and in another world is so interwoven with my moral nature that I am under as little apprehension of having the former torn from me as of losing the latter.
Belief | Future | God | Life | Life | Little | Man | Nature | Sentiment | Will | World | God |
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.
Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world, in whose whole existence everything goes according to wish and will. It thus rests on the harmony of nature with his entire end and with the essential determining ground of his will.
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.
Force | Man | Nature | Understanding |
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.
As it is the nature of the body to be developed by appropriate exercises, it is the nature of the soul to be developed by moral precepts.
If Time is considered by itself, it immediately dissolves into an absolute multiplicity of instants which considered separately lose all temporal nature and are reduced purely and simply to the total a-temporality of the this.
There is no surer mark of a low and unregenerate nature than this tendency of power to loudness and wantonness instead of quietness and reverence.
God is infinite; and the laws of nature, like nature itself, are finite. These methods of working, therefore, which correspond to the physical element in us, do not exhaust His agency. There is a boundless residue of disengaged energy beyond.
Sometimes there are living beings in nature as beautiful as in romance. Reality surpasses imagination; and we see breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep.
Imagination | Land | Nature | Reality | Romance |
There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects... The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society... The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that the relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.
Circumstances | Man | Means | Nature | Society |
The divine nature is created and creates in the primordial causes; but in their effects it is created and does not create. And not without reason, since in these effects it establishes the end of its descent, that is, of its appearance. In the scriptures, therefore, every corporeal and visible creature which falls under the senses is generally called - and not inappropriately - an outermost trace of the divine nature.
Appearance | Nature | Reason |