This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten... America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness - justice.
Debt | Determination | Greatness | History | Indispensable | Justice | Ugly | Will | Wisdom |
Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
Nature has given women two painful but heavenly gifts, which distinguish them, and often raise them above human nature - compassion and enthusiasm. By compassion, they devote themselves; by enthusiasm they exalt themselves.
Compassion | Distinguish | Enthusiasm | Human nature | Nature | Wisdom |
That is not faith, to see God only in what is strange and rare; but this is faith, to see God in what is most common and simple, to know God's greatness not so much from disorder as from order, not so much from those strange sights in which God seems (but only seems) to break His laws, as from those common ones in which He fulfills His laws.
Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz
There are never in nature two beings which are exactly alike.
V. C. Kitchen, fully Victor C. Kitchen
In the business of life, Man is the only product. And there is only one direction in which man can possibly develop if he is to make a better living or yield a bigger dividend to himself, to his race, to nature or to God. He must grow in knowledge, wisdom, kindliness and understanding.
Better | Business | God | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Race | Understanding | Wisdom | Business |
Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
For it is unknown what is the real nature of the soul, whether it be born with the bodily frame or be infused at the moment of birth, whether it perishes along with us, when death separates the soul and body, or whether it visits the shades of Pluto and bottomless pits, or enters by divine appointment into other animals.
The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it, and from thence penetrate into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Display | Knowledge | Mankind | Nature | Principles | Religion | Revelation | Wisdom |
War is no more inevitable than the plague is inevitable. War is no more a part of human nature than the burning of witches is a human act.
Human nature | Inevitable | Nature | War | Wisdom |
It is the limitation of our awareness that would classify certain phenomena or abilities as metaphysical. Our awareness about what Nature is all about is grossly limited. Whatever is outside these limitations we tend to call metaphysical and then define as something beyond the scope of science and reason.
Awareness | Nature | Phenomena | Reason | Science | Wisdom | Awareness |
Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
Society's preservation and man's happiness depend on illusion. Nature itself, which certainly represents the will of God, deludes us in many respects, as when it leads us by the cords of love to reproduce the race. If a youth would consider the trouble in rearing a family, not one in a thousand would marry, but nature closes our eyes to the future (and indeed, wherever popular knowledge rises, the birth rate declines). The same is true of the other passions, which nature utilizes to deceive man and goad them toward the attainment of ends which, when attained, turn out to be but vanity.
Attainment | Birth | Ends | Family | Future | God | Illusion | Knowledge | Love | Man | Nature | Race | Society | Will | Wisdom | Youth | Youth | Trouble | Happiness |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
Men nearly always follow the tracks made by others and proceed in their affairs by imitation, even though they cannot entirely keep to the tracks of others or emulate the prowess of their models. So a prudent man should always follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been outstanding. If his own prowess fails to compare with theirs, at least it has an air of greatness about it.