This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The search for truth is one way hard, and in another way easy. For it is evident that no one can master it fully, nor yet miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled, there arises a certain grandeur.
The pursuit of science in itself is never materialistic. It is a search for the principles of law and order in the universe, and as such an essentially religious endeavor.
All religions promise a reward… for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.
Heart | Promise | Reward | Understanding | Will |
Arthur C Clarke, formally Sir Arthur Charles Clark
A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a “meaning” as well, that will be a bonus. If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live - or to play. Our graceful, smiling cousins in the sea may be wiser than us.
Beauty | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Play | Search | Time | Truth | Waste | Will | Wise | Beauty |
Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people.
Discernment | People | Teacher | Think |
Today. Mend a quarrel. Search out a friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a love letter. Share some treasure. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in a word or deed. Keep a promise. Find the time. Forego a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Listen. Apologize if you were wrong. Try to understand. Flout envy. Examine demands on others. Think first of someone else. Appreciate, be kind, be gentle. Laugh a little more. Deserve confidence. Take up arms against malice. Decry complacency. Express your gratitude. Worship your God. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love. Speak it again. Still speak it again. Speak it still once again.
Beauty | Complacency | Confidence | Earth | Enemy | Envy | Friend | God | Gratitude | Heart | Little | Love | Loyalty | Loyalty | Malice | Pleasure | Promise | Search | Suspicion | Time | Trust | Wonder | Worship | Wrong | Youth | Beauty | Forgive | Think |
All the glory of greatness has no luster for people who are in search of understanding.
Glory | Greatness | People | Search | Understanding |
Discovering the ways in which you are exceptional, the particular path you are meant to follow, is your business on this earth, whether you are afflicted or not. It's just that the search takes on a special urgency when you realize you are mortal.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Heart | Punishment | World |
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.
When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute.
Action | Age | Caution | Error | Hope | Little | Rashness | Trust | Youth |
The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.
We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore, never go abroad in search of your wants: for if they be real wants they will come in search of you. He that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy.
Doubt is the vestibule which all must pass before they can enter the temple of wisdom. When we are in doubt and puzzle out the truth by our own exertions, we have gained something that will stay by us and will serve us again. But if to avoid the trouble of the search we avail ourselves of the superior information of a friend, such knowledge will not remain with us; we have not bought, but borrowed it.
Doubt | Friend | Knowledge | Search | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Trouble |
The nature or very essence of phenomena, whether vital or mineral, will always remain unknown... Absolute knowledge could, therefore, leave nothing outside itself; and only on condition of knowing everything could man be granted its attainment. Man behaves as if he were destined to reach this absolute knowledge; and the incessant why which he puts to nature proves it. Indeed, this hope, constantly disappointed, constantly reborn, sustains and always will sustain successive generation sin the passionate search for truth.
Absolute | Attainment | Hope | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Nothing | Phenomena | Search | Sin | Truth | Will |
The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
Enemy | Future | Hope | Inspiration | Man | Optimism | Present |
All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.
Esteem | Individual | Pride | Search | Self | Self-esteem |