This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A. H. R. Fairchild, fully Arthur Henry Rolph Fairchild
The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.
Ability | Calmness | Culture | Day | Flexibility | Judgment | Life | Life | Mind | Openness | Problems | Question | Self | Sympathy | Wisdom | Flexibility |
I don’t see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, I.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in the future.
Confidence | Future | Intuition | Meaning | Perception | Question | Reason | Sense | Theories | Will | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation. Only patient, persevering research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about a change.
Change | Enough | Light | Little | Problems | Research | Science | Wisdom |
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
A single mind can acquire a fair knowledge of the whole field of science, and find plenty of time to spare for ordinary human affairs. Not many people take the trouble to do so. But without a knowledge of science one cannot understand current events. That is why our modern our modern literature and art are mostly so unreal.
Art | Events | Knowledge | Literature | Mind | People | Plenty | Science | Time | Wisdom | Trouble | Art | Understand |
Without my work in natural science I should never have known human beings as they really are. In no other activity can one come so close to direct perception and clear thought, or realize so fully the errors of the senses, the mistakes of the intellect, the weakness and greatnesses of human character.
Character | Perception | Science | Thought | Weakness | Wisdom | Work |
John Hersey, fully John Richard Hersey
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
History | Opportunity | Wisdom | Witness |
Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.
Age | Art | Literature | Men | Public | Science | Sound | Thinking | Tradition | Wisdom | Old |
The person who thinks there can be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or very ignorant in religion.
Art is a staple of mankind - never a by-product of elitism. So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sing of life when every other aspect of civilization fails... Like hunger and sex, it is a disposition of the human cell - a marvelous fiction of the brain which recreates itself as something as mysterious as mind. Art is consistent with every aspect of every day in the life of every people.
Art | Civilization | Day | Hunger | Life | Life | Mankind | Mind | People | Wisdom | Art |
Twin-sister of natural and revealed religion, and of heavenly birth, science will never belie her celestial origin, nor cease to sympathize with all that emanates from the same pure home. Human ignorance and prejudice may for a time seem to have divorced what God has joined together; but human ignorance and prejudice shall at length pass away, and then science and religion shall be seen blending their parti-colored rays into one beautiful bow of light, linking heaven to earth and earth to heaven.
Birth | Earth | God | Heaven | Ignorance | Light | Prejudice | Religion | Science | Time | Will | Wisdom | God |
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty.
Appearance | Events | Ideas | Imagination | Man | Nothing | Power | Reality | Time | Vision | Wisdom |
As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder.
Age | Beauty | Children | Conformity | Curiosity | Experience | Hunger | Need | Science | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Beauty | Value |
Philip J. Hilts, fully Philip James Hilts
In all human activities, it is not ideas or machines that dominate; it is people. I have heard people speak of “the effect of personality on science.” But this is a backward thought. Rather, we should talk about he effect of science on personalities. Science is not the dispassionate analysis of impartial data. It is the human, and thus passionate, exercise of skill and sense on such date. Science is not an exercise in objectivity, but, more accurately, an exercise in which objectivity is prized.
Ideas | Machines | Objectivity | People | Personality | Science | Sense | Skill | Thought | Wisdom |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Religion may begin with our love of God, but true science ends there. In the very process of demystifying the world, we discover a new mystery, recognizing and celebrating God in everything.
Ends | God | Love | Mystery | Religion | Science | Wisdom | World | God |