This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it. They known from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more then they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it.
Confidence | Despise | Experience | Good | Means | Men | Observation | People | Public | Reason | Right | Sense | Wonder |
The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other. The human body provides our closest experience of the interplay of actualities in nature.
Body | Existence | Experience | Nature |
Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.
Books | Experience | Observation |
André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.
Emotions | Experience | Important |
Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundation of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
Abstract | Association | Devotion | Experience | Nature | Phenomena | Power | Principles | Theories | Association |
Elderly Men... have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They ‘think,’ but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefor suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but... love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love. They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive... They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past... Old men may feel pity, as well as young men, but not for the same reason. Young men feel it out of kindness; old men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls anyone else might easily happen to them.
Business | Day | Evil | Experience | Future | Hate | Hope | Kindness | Life | Life | Little | Love | Memory | Men | Nothing | Past | Pity | Reason | Weakness | Will | Old |
Intellectual virtues owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit... From this fact it is plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.
Birth | Experience | Growth | Habit | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
Anything which parents have not learned from experience they can now learn from their children.
Children | Experience | Parents | Learn |
To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.
Existence | Experience |
Reason cannot make us experience love, but it can give us intellectual assurance that love is good.
Experience | Good | Love | Reason |
The one thing that a man is absolutely certain about is his own existence. He may come to believe that the world outside him is real or unreal, that he is sitting at a solid table, as his senses tell him, or at a cluster of whirling electrons, as the nuclear scientists tell him, that there is or is not a God, that other people really exists or that they are imagined by him, like equally real-seeming people he saw in last night’s dream; but what he knows from personal, first-hand experience is his own existence.
Normal experience at the sensory level is that of dualism; but the deeper our insight penetrates the terms, pantheism or monism lose their significance; for Ultimate Reality embraces everything in a nameless undifferentiated continuum.
Experience | Insight | Reality |
Reality is the transcendent and immanent Ground of all being. Man’s only aim in living is to experience the eternal in the midst of time; as Spinoza expresses it, to know all existences under the form of eternity.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success; and it is by that experience of all fortunes and all feelings that a great national character is created.
Character | Experience | Feelings | Patriotism | Success | Suffering |