This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy.
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.
Genius |
Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Act because you need to act… Don’t forget that everything you deal with is only one thing and nothing else... above all don’t forget to follow your destiny through to its conclusion… Don't allow your mind to tell your heart what to do. The mind gives up easily.
That at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie… That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don't expect to get anything back, don't expect recognition for your efforts, don't expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are… That the truest experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
Change | Control | Experience | Genius | Important | Love | Need | People | World | Understand |
Persius, fully Aulus Persius Flaccus NULL
Indulge, and to thy genius freely give, for not to live at ease is not to live.
Genius |
Pete Seeger, born Peter Seeger
Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.
Genius |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
In fact, it is certain that in proportion as the human mind frees itself from ideas inculcated by minorities of priests, military chiefs and judges, all striving to establish their domination, and of scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in which conception there is no longer room for those dominating minorities. A society entering into possession of the social capital accumulated by the labor of preceding generations, organizing itself so as to make use of this capital in the interests of all, and constituting itself without reconstituting the power of the ruling minorities. It comprises in its midst an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies: it excludes none. It even calls for struggles and contentions; because we know that periods of contests, so long as they were freely fought out, without the weight of constituted authority being thrown on the one side of the balance, were periods when human genius took its mightiest flight and achieved the greatest aims. Acknowledging, as a fact, the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past, it no longer recognizes a division between exploited and exploiters, governed and governors, dominated and dominators, and it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst — not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association.
Authority | Genius | Ideas | Individual | Labor | Men | Mind | Power | Rights | Society | Society |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
It even calls for struggles and contentions; because we know that periods of contests, so long as they were freely fought out, without the weight of constituted authority being thrown on the one side of the balance, were periods when human genius took its mightiest flight and achieved the greatest aims.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
Absolute | Achievement | Genius | Important | Means | Men | Method | Position | Rank | Simplicity | Value |
David Swing, aka Professor Swing
The world will, sooner or later, be compelled to go to the Divine presence not to human presence for its new heart. Mankind has not holiness enough to entice any heart from its sins has not love enough to persuade, nor power enough to alarm. It is the conception of an ever-present God ; it is the sublime divinity of Jesus ; it is communion with these charac ters ; it is a belief in the infinite love, and power, and justice, and in the all-pervading presence of Deity, that can give to this world noble, converted hearts, and can bear earth along toward the new birth the new genius of human life.
Belief | Birth | Divinity | Earth | Enough | Genius | God | Heart | Love | Power | World | God |
Pope Boniface VIII, born Benedetto Gaetani NULL
Silence is the genius of fools and one of the virtues of the wise.
Genius |
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.
Genius |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less. Edited by entrepreneur John M. Shanahan, who created the wildly successful Hooked on Phonics program, this wonderful book presents the best that has been thought and said on every imaginable topic.
Genius | Language | Sound | Thought | Wisdom | Wit | Thought |
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less. Edited by entrepreneur John M. Shanahan, who created the wildly successful Hooked on Phonics program, this wonderful book presents the best that has been thought and said on every imaginable topic.
Genius | Language | Sound | Thought | Wisdom | Wit | Thought |