This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vocabulary is an index to a civilization, and ours is a disturbed one. That's why so many of the new words deal with war, violence, drugs, racism, and not so many with peace and prosperity.
Civilization | Peace | Prosperity | War | Wisdom | Words |
No man shall be held responsible for words uttered in affliction.
Affliction | Man | Wisdom | Words |
Tolerance of opinions which are thought to be innocuous is as easy, as acts of charity that entail no sacrifice. But the test of a free society is its tolerance of what is deplored or despised by a majority of its members. The argument for such tolerance must be made on the ground that it is useful to the society... that free societies are better fitted to survive than closed societies.
Argument | Better | Charity | Majority | Sacrifice | Society | Thought | Wisdom | Society | Thought |
Their repetitive words and phrases are merely methods of convincing the subconscious mind.
If the memory is more flexible in childhood, it is more tenacious in mature age; if childhood has sometimes the memory of words, old age has that of things, which impress themselves according tot he clearness of the conception of the thought which we wish to retain.
Age | Childhood | Memory | Old age | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Old | Thought |
Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence.
Action | Example | Habit | Influence | Reason | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Thinking is the process that I hold in horror. I have thought for fifty years, with the most ghastly and disastrous results, mostly thoughts of my own, and if I attempt to superpose the thoughts of other people, I find my mental equipment utterly inadequate to the strain.
Catherine Bowen, née Catherine Shober Drinker
The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all.
Courage | Ideals | Life | Life | Persistence | Shame | Success | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Words | Afraid |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.
Knowledge | Purpose | Purpose | Reading | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
Constraint | Effort | Language | Play | Speech | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Wit | Words | Work | Thought |