This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Everyone in the world from the most successful to the least needs encouragement. Make it your career to give others encouragement.
The foundations of the world will be shaky until the moral props are restored.
We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive... To seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to truth.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
The way of the world is to make laws, but follow customs.
What is then liberty? To be born is at once to be born in the world and to the world. The world is already constituted, but never completely. Under the first rapport, we are solicited, under the second we are open to an infinity of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, because we exist under these two relations at once. There is therefore never determinism and never absolute choice; I am never a thing and never naked consciousness.
Absolute | Abstract | Character | Choice | Consciousness | Liberty | Wisdom | World |
Alberto Moravia, Pen name of Alberto Pincherle
Modern man - whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone - can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.
Perhaps we scarcely notice that in every direction our natural understanding leads us to nothing. We come either to contradiction or to the unknown... We do not think of the growth of a seed in our world in the same way. We cannot imitate growth. Growth is from ‘inside’. Higher dimensions enter our world from inside, from the direction of the most minute.
Character | Contradiction | Growth | Nothing | Understanding | World | Think |
What is man’s life compared to the life of the whole Universe? If man’s life is nothing but a minute part of the life of the whole world if he inserted into the cycle of all the Universe so that his appearance and reappearance is dependent upon the gigantic cosmic processes that belong to the Universe, what chance has he of altering anything in his destiny?
Appearance | Chance | Character | Destiny | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Universe | World |