This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Perception is based, to a very large extent, on conceptual models - which are always inadequate, often incomplete and sometimes profoundly wrong. This complex situation arose because signals from the environment itself can be inadequate. The sort of information we need is not always available. And so, knowledge from the past, mixed up with assumptions about that knowledge which may be more or less appropriate, are used to augment information provided by the senses. Which means that our perception of any situation depends only partly on sensory signals being received at that time. And it is only a very short step from there, to perception which occurs in the absence of all immediate signals and has to be labeled “extrasensory”.
Absence | Knowledge | Means | Need | Past | Perception | Time | Wisdom | Wrong |
William M. Watt, fully William Montgomery Watt
Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.
Faith | Statistics | Wisdom |
Everyone expects to go further than his father went; everyone expects to be better than he was born and every generation has one big impulse in its heart - to exceed all the other generations of the past in all the things that make life worth living.
Better | Father | Heart | Impulse | Life | Life | Past | Wisdom | Worth |
No matter! – so long as the world is the work of eternal goodness, and so long as conscience has not deceived us – to give happiness, and to do good, there is our only law, our anchor of salvation, our beacon light, our reason for existing. All religions may crumble away; so long as this survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living.
Conscience | Eternal | Good | Law | Life | Life | Light | Reason | Salvation | Work | World | Worth |
We need to find a form of life that is valuable in itself. What can make a life meaningful? Candidates for this role need to be worthwhile in themselves and not just means to future ends. They need to treat each human life as an autonomous being-for-itself, not merely a being-in-itself to serve some cause beyond it. They need to satisfy our aesthetic and ethical needs, as being both tied to the present moment and existing across time. And there is no reason why such meaning should not be found in this life and not only in a supposed life to come.
Aesthetic | Cause | Ends | Future | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Need | Present | Reason | Time |
History tells us that the pendulum of time is sweeping to extremes of subjectivism, to cults of selfishness and savage irresponsibility. We must bring it back to balance by taking up the burdens of mankind as our own, with an entirely new vision and confidence. And we must do this perhaps as a condition for continued existence itself.
Balance | Confidence | Existence | History | Mankind | Selfishness | Time | Vision |
The meaning of death is not the annihilation of the spirit, but its separation from the body, and that the resurrection and day of assembly do not mean a return to a new existence after annihilation, but the bestowal of a new form or frame to the spirit.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
All organizations depend on the existence of shared meanings and interpretations of reality, which facilitate coordinated action.
To see altruism itself as the purpose of human life is confuse means and ends. We need to know whether good deeds are essential for life to be meaningful or whether they just comprise one possible road to fulfillment. Helping others cannot be the purpose of life, because helping others is just a means to an end… Altruism is thus not the source of life’s meaning but is something that living a meaningful life requires.
Altruism | Deeds | Ends | Fulfillment | Good | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Deeds |
Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney
Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth.
Art | Earth | Evolution | Individual | Love | Man | Means | Survival | Unique | Woman | Art |
There’s a scheme of evasion that has gotten into everybody. It’s as though people were to say: “I get home dog tired after a terrible day out in that jungle, and then I don’t want to think about it. Enough! I want to be brainwashed. I’m going to have my dinner and drink some beer, and I’m going to sit watching TV until I pass out – because that’s how I feel.” That means people are not putting up a struggle for the human part of themselves.
Day | Enough | Evasion | Means | People | Struggle | Think |
Everything proves the solidarity of individuals, and no one can think at all except by means of the general store of thought, accumulated and refined by centuries of cultivation and experience.
Cultivation | Experience | Means | Thought | Think |