This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Three out of five of the Four Hundred [eminent individuals of the twentieth century] had serious school problems. In order of importance, their dissatisfactions were: with the curriculum; with dull irrational or cruel teachers; with others students who bullied, ignored, or bored them; and with school failure.
He only is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor command in order to be something.
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Day | God | Life | Life | Little | Man | Music | Order | Poetry | Sense | Soul | Wisdom | God |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
Children | Experience | Experiment | Order | Taste | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
To be sure, if it is the purpose of educators to stifle the child’s power of independent thought as early as possible, in order to produce that ‘good behavior’ which is so highly prized, they cannot do better than deceive children in sexual matters and intimidate them by religious means. The stronger characters will, it is true, withstand these influences; they will become rebels against the authority of their parents and later against every other form of authority. When children do not receive the explanations for which they turn to their elders, they go on tormenting themselves in secret with the problem, and produce attempts at solution in which the truth they have guessed is mixed up in the most extraordinary way with grotesque inventions; or else they whisper confidences to each other which, because of the sense of guilt in the youthful inquirers, stamp everything sexual as horrible and disgusting.
Authority | Behavior | Better | Children | Good | Guilt | Means | Order | Parents | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Receive | Sense | Thought | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Thought |
James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield
It is one of the many paradoxes of psychology that the pursuit of happiness defeats its own purpose. We find happiness only when we do not directly seek it. An analogy will make this clear. In listening to music at a concert, we experience pleasurable feelings only so long as our attention is directed towards the music. But if in order to increase our happiness we give all our attention to our subjective feeling of happiness, it vanishes. Nature contrives to make it impossible for anyone to attain happiness by turning into himself.
Attention | Experience | Feelings | Listening | Music | Nature | Order | Psychology | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
Gail Hamilton, Pseud. of Mary A. Dodge
Men as yet need some help to their imagination. There remains still room for a little illusion. It is better for men, it is better for women, that each somewhat idealize the other. Much is lost when life has lost its atmosphere, and is reduced to naked fact.
Better | Illusion | Imagination | Life | Life | Little | Men | Need | Wisdom |
The shaman typically experiences ineffable joy in what he sees, an awe of the beautiful and mysterious worlds that open before him... He is a self-reliant explorer of the endless mansions of a magnificent hidden universe. Finally, he brings back his discoveries to build his knowledge and help others.
But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
Part of our good consists in the endeavor to do sorrows away, and in the power to sustain them when the endeavor fails, to bear them nobly, and thus help others to bear them as well.
‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter... In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ‘tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.
Good | Judgment | Little | Order | Passion | Reason | Wisdom | World |