This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Avoid law suits beyond all things; they influence your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.
William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade
Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.
While the law (of competition) may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is the best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.
Competition | Individual | Law | Race | Survival | Wisdom |
Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
One with the law is a majority.
Thought has always worked by opposition... By dual, hierarchized oppositions... Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions. And all the couples of oppositions are couples.
Law | Opposition | Thought | 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 |
Some people, in working toward a goal, find themselves seized by inertia when it comes time for action. If this should happen to you, despite the small graduated steps, then it is time to reexamine your goal. Consider how important it actually is and then either discard the goal and replace it with a more suitable one or continue the steps with a renewed sense of the value of achieving it.
Action | Important | People | Sense | Time | Wisdom | Inertia | Value |
The benefit of proverbs, or maxims, is that they separate those who act on principle from those who act on impulse; and they lead to promptness and decision in acting. Their value deepens on four things; do they embody correct principles; are they on important subjects; what is the extent, and what is the ease of their application?
Decision | Important | Impulse | Maxims | Principles | Promptness | Proverbs | Wisdom | Value |
Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.