This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
Constraint | Distinguish | History | Means | Myth | Politics | Power | Reward | Society | Solitude | Study | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | World | Society | Child | Privilege | Value |
Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is most thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.
The use of a thing is only a part of its significance. To know anything thoroughly, to have the full command of it in all its appliances, we must study it on its own account, independently of any special application.
Edward Hoagland, fully Edward Morley Hoagland
Any careful study of living things, whether wolves, bears or man, reminds one of the same direct truth; also of the clarity of the fact that evolution itself is obviously not some process of drowning being clutching at straws and climbing from suffering and trail and virtual expiration to tenuous, momentary survival. Rather, evolution has been a matter of days well-lived, chameleon strength, energy, zappy sex, sunshine stored up, inventiveness, competitiveness, and the whole fun of busy brain cells.
Energy | Evolution | Fun | Man | Strength | Study | Suffering | Survival | Truth | Wisdom |
To study and forget is like bearing children and burying them.
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
History | Man | Mind | Nothing | Opinion | Past | Present | Study | Wisdom |
How shall man obtain conception of the majesty of the Divine...? Through the expansion of his scientific faculties; through the liberation of his imagination...; through the disciplined study of the world and of life; through the cultivation of a rich, multifarious sensitivity to every phase of being. All these desiderata require obviously the study of all the branches of wisdom, all the philosophies of life, all the ways of the diverse civilizations and doctrines of ethics and religion in every nation and tongue.
Cultivation | Ethics | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Religion | Study | Wisdom | World |
Knowledge is acquired by study and observation, but wisdom cometh by opportunity of leisure; the ripest thought comes from the mind which is not always on the stretch, but fed, at times, by a wise passiveness.
Knowledge | Leisure | Mind | Observation | Opportunity | Study | Thought | Wisdom | Wise | Thought |
He who would be the tongue of this wide land must string his harp with chords of study iron and strike it with a toil-imbrowned hand.
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.
Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful.
Enough | Heart | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Reward | Sympathy | Will | Wisdom |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
Desire | Experience | Study | Wisdom |
The study of proverbs may be more instructive and comprehensive than the most elaborate scheme of philosophy.
Philosophy | Proverbs | Study | Wisdom |