This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Opinion is a consciously insufficient judgment, subjectively as well as objectively. Belief is subjectively sufficient, but is recognized as being objectively insufficient. Knowledge is both subjectively and objectively sufficient. Subjective sufficiency is termed conviction (for myself); objective sufficiency is termed certainty (for all).
It is well when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered amongst the multitudes. Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions of truths may be propagated amongst the people ... The whole land must be watered with the streams of knowledge.
Better | Knowledge | Land | People | Power | Truth | Wise | Truths |
Synthesis in general... is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the sul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.
Imagination | Indispensable | Knowledge | Power |
Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
Humility does not consist in hiding our talents and virtues, in thinking ourselves worse and more ordinary than we are, but in possessing a clear knowledge of all that is lacking in us and in not exalting ourselves for that which we have, seeing that God has freely given it us and that, with all His gifts, we are still of infinitely little importance.
One who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others.
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
Our convictions on important matters are not the result of knowledge or critical thought, nor, it may be added, are they often dictated by supposed self-interest. Most of them are pure prejudices in the proper sense of that word. We do not form them ourselves. They are the whisperings of “the voice of the herd.”
Convictions | Important | Knowledge | Self | Self-interest | Sense | Thought |
The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing, but that it is the external sign of an internal deficiency.
In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge bout myself. This being so, in discovering my inner being I discover the other person at the same time, like a freedom placed in front of me which thinks and wills only for or against me. Hence, let us at once announce the discovery of a world which we shall call inter-subjectivity; this is the world in which man decides what he is and what others are.
Discovery | Existence | Freedom | Indispensable | Knowledge | Man | Order | Time | Truth | Wills | World | Discovery |
Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing left to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not-world. For it is impossible reflectively to know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names.
Acceptance | Concealment | God | Know thyself | Knowledge | Man | Nothing | Reflection | Self | Soul | Truth | World | God |
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
How little of our knowledge of mankind is derived from intentional accurate observation! Most of it has, unsought, found its way into the mind from the continual presentations of the objects to our unthinking view. It is a knowledge of sensation more than of reflection.
Knowledge | Little | Mankind | Mind | Observation | Reflection |
Truth is the fountain of all knowledge and the cement of all societies.