This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
The Perennial Philosophy... the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of immanent and transcendent Ground of being.
Knowledge | Man | Philosophy | Psychology | Reality | Soul | Wisdom | World |
Archbishop Lakovos, born Demetrios Koukouzis NULL
Men and women are here for only one purpose, and, for that matter, the most sublime purpose: to try to re-create life in its original form by restoring beauty and order in their individual lives and by continuously striving to achieve the common dream of one world community... We must master and direct our destiny. We are here, therefore, to continue God’s creative work and give to life its true meaning: to arrive at His image and likeness and turn the world into a loving society of men and women.
Beauty | Destiny | God | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Men | Order | Purpose | Purpose | Society | Wisdom | Work | World | Society | Beauty |
Instead of production, primarily, we have to think of sustainability. Instead of dominating nature, we have to acknowledge that nature is our source and best teacher. Instead of understanding the world in parts, we need to think about the whole.
One thing everybody in the world wants and needs is friendliness.
There are two persons in the world we never see as they are - one’s self and one’s other self.
The aging man of the middle twentieth century lives, not in the public world of atomic physics and conflicting ideologies, of welfare states and supersonic speed, but in his strictly private universe of physical weakness and mental decay.
Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
Those who are unacquainted with the world take pleasure in the intimacy of great men; those who are wiser dread the consequences.
How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls, a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one’s children rich.
Children | Generosity | Luxury | Selfishness | Wife | Wisdom | World |
All the philosophy... in the world and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behavior different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life.
Behavior | Conduct | Experience | Life | Life | Nothing | Philosophy | Religion | Will | Wisdom | World |
'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers
All forms of the corporeal world are transitory, [but] for pure existence there is only a passing away of which it has no knowledge. Foundering requires knowledge, and than a reaction to it... Man alone can founder, and this capacity is to him not unequivocal: it challenges him to react to it.
What has been the effect of religious coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.