This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.
Conversation | Integrity | Intention | Man | Nothing | Reason | Truth |
Man is, properly speaking based upon hope; he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.
The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us, and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it, and much speaking or delight in it will often no small hindrance of that good which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us.
God | Good | Life | Life | Nothing | Silence | Spirit | Will | God |
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
I have no patience with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children's heads. For it is not by learning rules that we acquire the powers of speaking a language, but by daily intercourse with those accustomed to express themselves with exactness and refinement and by copious reading of the best authors.
Children | Language | Learning | Patience | Reading | Refinement | Stupidity | Teacher |
I think the collective unconscious is actually becoming the Collective Consciousness. With the mass media, every time we watch some event, whether it's a mass sporting event or it's the president speaking about one thing or another, we are tuning in with our collective consciousness to a happening in the world. In the past, we didn't have that ability. And so in a way, we have been awakening a capacity for reflective consciousness at a social level unbeknownst to humanity. It's an almost invisible process of bio-osmosis; we are developing a new capacity for witnessing, for being an observing species, and this is transformative.
Ability | Awakening | Capacity | Consciousness | Humanity | Past | Time | World | Think |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.
I now exercize my fearless faith in three ways - by thinking, speaking and acting. I am unmoved by appearances, therefore appearances move.
Faith |
Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Learn |
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Everything in life is speaking in spite of it's apparent silence.
Jacob Bohme, or Jacob Behmen or Jakob Böhme
When thou standest still from thinking and willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed to thee, and so God heareth and seeth through thee. Thine own hearing, willing, and seeing hindereth thee, that thou dost not see nor hear God.
Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it.
Choice | Ends | Psychoanalysis | Taste | Value |
I never use the word "nation" in speaking of the United States. I always use the word "Union" or "Confederacy." We are not a nation but a union, a confederacy of equal and sovereign States.
When children ask you questions about gray hairs, and wrinkles in the face, and sighs that have no words, and smiles too bright to be carved upon the radiant face by the hands of hypocrisy--when they ask you about kneeling at the altar, speaking into the vacant air, and uttering words to an unseen and in an invisible Presence--when they interrogate you about your great psalms, and hymns, and anthem-bursts of thankfulness, what is your reply to these? Do not be ashamed of the history. Keep steadily along the line of fact. Say what happened to you, and magnify God in the hearing of the inquirer.
L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
Speech is insufficient to utter the last things; and this troubles it not, because the last things may be heard speaking for themselves. At last, after long delay the wondering soul gives form to that which is stirring within it and produces its works art and song and mighty deeds.
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
To lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things it would take off something from God's grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.
Truth |