This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception.
Belief | Cause | Common Sense | Memory | Pain | Perception | Power | Sense | Thought | Wisdom | Absurdity | Think | Thought |
Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brain-washing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world - the Executive Branch of the United States Government.
Control | Government | Nothing | Sense | Wisdom | World | Propaganda |
Court the society of a superior, and make much of the opportunity; for in the company of an equal thy good fortune must decline.
Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren
If we recognize love, it is by its beauty. If we recognize truth, it is by its beauty. The meaning of life is beauty. When we sense and experience beauty, we are looking straight into the face of the Creator. We achieve transcendent union with the mind of God. We were born to be aware of it and to create more of it.
Beauty | Experience | God | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Sense | Truth | Wisdom |
Sam Shoemaker, fully Samuel "Sam" Moor Shoemaker, III
Happiness is the sense that one matters. Happiness is an abiding enthusiasm. Happiness is single-mindedness. Happiness is whole-heartedness. Happiness is a by-product. Happiness is faith.
Enthusiasm | Faith | Sense | Wisdom | Happiness |
We should accustom the mind to keep the best company by introducing it only to the best books.
Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
Pleasure, when it is a man's chief purpose, disappoints itself; and the constant application to it palls the faculty of enjoying it, and leaves the sense of our inability for that we wish, with a disrelish of everything else.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
In times when the passions are beginning to take charge of the conduct of human affairs, one should pay less attention to what men of experience and common sense are thinking than to what is preoccupying the imagination of dreamers.
Attention | Beginning | Common Sense | Conduct | Experience | Imagination | Men | Sense | Thinking | Wisdom |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.
Lord Edward Thurlow, First Baron
Common sense is in spite of, not because of age.
Age | Common Sense | Sense | Wisdom |
All societies create their own worlds, using language and folklore to impose an arbitrary order on the complexity of the cosmos. This ordering of reality helps make sense of things by interpreting information in ways which are compatible with what is already known.
The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets.
Childhood | Children | Labor | Men | Nature | Passion | Play | Poetry | Sense | Wisdom | World |
The best definition of wealth - the only true definition, I think - is the possession of whatever gives us happiness, contentment or a sense of one's significance in the scheme of things.
Contentment | Sense | Wealth | Wisdom | Think |