This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
In dealing with the environment we must learn now how to master nature but how to master ourselves, our institutions, and our technology.
Nature | Technology | Wisdom | Learn |
Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might just as well be twenty.
No one should make a statement like "youth is the happiest time of life" without being prepared to accept its intellectual consequences.
The function of art is no longer to satisfy wants, including intellectual wants, but to serve as a stimulus to further creation. The Sistine Chapel is valuable not for the feelings it aroused in the past but for the creative acts it will instigate in the future. Art comes into being through a chain of inspiration.
Art | Feelings | Future | Inspiration | Past | Wants | Will | Wisdom | Art |
The works of a person that builds begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste and that is annual variety.
Imagination | Perfection | Pleasure | Taste | Wisdom | Circumstance |
Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now - always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances.
Circumstances | Time | Truth | Wisdom |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
In the end we shall have to say that there is no solution of an intellectual kind and that it is part of the general mystical paradox that the mystical revelation transcends the intellect.
Mystical | Paradox | Revelation | Wisdom |
Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe
A species does not live within its environment; it interacts with it. Over a period of time a species can interact so violently that the changes it catalyzes can cause it to change dramatically--even to die out. Scientists estimate that 90% of the life forms that have inhabited our planet are now extinct. From the earliest single-cell life form to the human animal, all have interacted with the environment. All have created problems for themselves. All have been agents of evolutionary change. All have experienced evolution through cataclysm.
Cause | Change | Evolution | Life | Life | Problems | Time | Wisdom |
It is not the eye, that sees the beauty of the heaven, nor the ear, that hears the sweetness of music or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident, but the soul, that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savory are its perceptions.
Accident | Beauty | Heaven | Music | Soul | Wisdom | Beauty |
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways.
We are, without permission but with our tacit approval, the subjects of a giant electrical experiment. Nor is there any end in sight. The density of radio waves around us now is 100 million times the natural level reaching us from the Sun, and by 1990 it will have doubled again. When superconducting cables are introduced, the field strength around power line will be increased by another twenty times. And electric cars and vehicles moved by magnetic levitation will add entirely new sources of electropollution to the stew with which we are already assailed. Meanwhile, the first results of the experiment are starting to come in and there is, it seems, no place to hide.
Experiment | Power | Strength | Will | Wisdom |
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.
E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.