This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good. Otherwise, he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community.
Enough | Good | Individual | Knowledge | Man | Men | Motives | Order | Personality | Relationship | Sense | Teach | Understanding | Learn | Understand |
The free man acts morally because he has a moral idea. He does not act in order that morality may come into being. A moral idea, born of intuition without compulsion, inner or outer, would be at one and the same time the highest motive and the highest driving force in man.
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. What man's mind can create, man's character can control.
Character | Day | Death | Force | Man | Mind | Order | Science | Torture | War | Will |
Robert W. Fuller, fully Robert Works Fuller
Not every age is an age of heroes. In order for there to be such larger-than-life figures among us, there must be great social causes, such as just wars or liberation movements that call for extraordinary leadership. Otherwise there are no heroic niches to be filled, and we look elsewhere – to business, sports, entertainment – for people to admire.
Age | Business | Entertainment | Life | Life | Order | People |
We narratively represent our selves in part in order to answer certain questions of identity. It is useful to distinguish two different aims of self-representation that in the end are deeply intertwined. First, there is self-representation for the sake of self-understanding. This is the story we tell ourselves to understand ourselves for who we are. The ideal here is convergence between self-representation and an acceptable version of the story of our actual identity. Second, there is self-representation for public dissemination, whose aim is underwriting successful social interaction.
Aims | Distinguish | Order | Public | Self | Story | Understanding | Understand |
Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré
No man can build a bridge to God. But God never forces man to cross the bridge he builds for him. God never drags man across unwillingly to a relationship of love and communion. Even man’s obedience, in order to be real, must be from the heart; it must be willed by man.
God | Heart | Love | Man | Obedience | Order | Relationship | God |
Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.
Intelligence | Mind | Order |
Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
It is not doubtful, but the most certain of all certainties, n- nay, the foundation of all certainties - the one absolutely valid objective truth - that there is a moral order in the world.
A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought: to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does… Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the presence of God.
Action | Deeds | Ecstasy | God | Order | Thought | Deeds | Understand |
Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.
Abstract | Awareness | Capacity | Desire | Faith | Force | Ideas | Intuition | Knowledge | Lying | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Reality | Reason | Self | Will | Wonder | Awareness |
Paradoxically, then, the best life to live will be one that is constantly struggling to become a different sort of life, a life with more virtue and less enjoyment, with more to admire and less to envy. If that best of lives were to succeed in becoming what it strives to change itself into, however, it would not longer be the best of lives. It would then be a life purely of self-sacrifice, an unenviable life suitable only for admiration. So what life should we seek, then? If what we are asking is either what kind of life to seek in order to gain a purely enviable life, or what kind of life to seek in order to achieve a purely admirable life, for those questions, the answer is fairly easy. Only a life with both elements resonates with a full portion of good. And that life, I think we have to recognize, will also be a life in which the two types of good remain in tension; a life in which the enviable and the admirable are never quite reconciled.
Admiration | Change | Enjoyment | Envy | Good | Life | Life | Order | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Think |
He who has enough to satisfy what he wants, and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance - all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality and pride.
Avarice | Enough | Labor | Men | Order | Position | Pride | Riches | Sensuality | Wants | Wealth |
God always interior to man, and unyielding, He, the true conscience to the false; a prohibition to the spark to extinguish itself; an order to the ray to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the real absolute when it is confronted with the fictitious absolute; humanity imperishable; that splendid phenomenon, the most beautiful perhaps of our interior wonders.
Absolute | Conscience | God | Humanity | Man | Order | Soul |