This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
Action | Experience | Faith | Future | Reality | Religion | Sense | Will | Wisdom |
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Action | Beginning | Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Inheritance | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Sense | Struggle | War | Wisdom |
Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.
Change | Intelligence | Wisdom |
The time has come when we must hope our children and their children ad infinitum will want from life more than material success. They must have enough of that to ensure a roof, clothing, food and some recreation, but, if we are to survive for another two hundred years, we must change our way of life.
Change | Children | Enough | Hope | Life | Life | Recreation | Success | Time | Will | Wisdom |
Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.
Belief | Contradiction | Error | Health | Mind | Pleasure | Truth | Wisdom | Absurdity |
Fred Dretske, fully Frederick "Fred" Irwin Dretske
There is a gap between belief and knowledge... If you can’t know it, you can’t believe it either.
Great joy, especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.
Change | Circumstances | Heart | Joy | Wisdom |
Albert Flanders, Albert I, born Albert Leopold Clément Marie Meinrad
Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity.
Change | Duty | Opportunity | Wisdom |