This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception.
Belief | Cause | Common Sense | Memory | Pain | Perception | Power | Sense | Thought | Wisdom | Absurdity | Think | Thought |
As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life.
Art | Chance | Civilization | Contradiction | Feelings | Harmony | Imagination | Law | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Necessity | Play | Reality | Reason | Thought | Unity | Wisdom | Art | Thought |
I would be virtuous for my own sake, thought nobody were to know it; as I would be clean for my own sake, though nobody could see me.
The only thought in the world that is worth anything is free thought. To free thought we owe all past progress and all hope for the future. Since when has any one made it appear that shackled thought could get on better than that which is free? Brains are a great misfortune if one is never to use them.
Better | Future | Hope | Misfortune | Past | Progress | Thought | Wisdom | World | Worth | Misfortune | Thought |
The abdication of thought has been the decisive factor in the collapse of civilization.
Civilization | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Mind set free in the Dharma-realm, I sit at the moon-filled window Watching the mountains with my ears, Hearing the stream with open eyes. Each molecule preaches perfect law, Each moment chants true sutra: The most fleeting thought is timeless, A single hair's enough to stir the sea.
Meditation is the nurse of thought, and thought the food for meditation.
Meditation | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Thought engenders thought. Place one idea upon paper, another will follow it, and still another, until you have written a page. You cannot fathom your mind. It is a well of thought which has no bottom. The more you draw from it, the more clear and fruitful will it be. If you neglect to think yourself, and use other people's thoughts, giving them utterance only, you will never know what you are capable of. At first your ideas may come out in lumps, homely and shapeless; but no matter; time and perseverance will arrange and polish them. Learn to think, and you will learn to write; the more you think, the better you will express your ideas.
Better | Giving | Ideas | Mind | Neglect | People | Perseverance | Thought | Time | Will | Wisdom | Learn | Think | Thought |
Religion... sex... race... money... avoidance rites... malnutrition... dreams - no part of these can be looked at and clearly seen without looking at the whole of them. For, as a painter mixes colors and makes of them new colors, so religion is turned into something different by race, and segregation is colored as much by sex as by skin pigment, and money is no longer a coin but a lost wish wandering through a man’s whole life.
Dreams | Life | Life | Man | Money | Race | Religion | Rites | Wisdom |
I once gave a lady two-and-twenty receipts against melancholy; one was a bright fire; another, to remember all the pleasant things said to her; another, to keep a box of sugarplums on the chimney-piece and a kettle simmering on the hob. I thought this mere trifling at the moment, but have in after life discovered how true it is that these little pleasures often banish melancholy better than higher and more exalted objects; and that no means ought to be thought too trifling which can oppose it either in ourselves or in others.
Better | Life | Life | Little | Means | Melancholy | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |