This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
He never taught any law or practice contrary to the Written Law. Only after his death... many of his disciples introduced practices and doctrines altogether foreign to him, removing thereby the cornerstone of the Law while winning the multitudes.
John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent
Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.
Character | Civilization | Ideas |
Too many follow example rather than precept; but it is safer to learn rather from precept than example. Man a wise teacher does not follow his own teaching; for it is easier to say, do this, than to do it. If then I see good doctrine with an evil life, though I pity the last, I will follow the first. Good sayings belong to all; evil actions only to their authors.
Character | Doctrine | Evil | Example | Good | Life | Life | Man | Pity | Precept | Will | Wise | Learn | Teacher |
We are always looking for pleasure, frantically seeking happiness in many ways, and totally missing the simplest, most fundamental pleasure, which actually is also the greatest pleasure: just being here. When we are really present, the presence itself is made out of fullness, contentment and blissful pleasure... Happiness, value, and pleasure are not he result of anything. These qualities are part of our fundamental nature.
Contentment | Nature | Pleasure | Present | Qualities | Wisdom | Happiness |
Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf
Most forms of human creativity have one aspect n common: the attempt to give some sense to the various impressions, emotions, experiences, and actions that fill our lives, and thereby to give some meaning and value to our existence... The crisis of our time in the Western world is that the search for meaning has become meaningless for many of us.
Character | Creativity | Emotions | Existence | Meaning | Search | Sense | Time | World | Crisis | Value |
The physical loss is not sufficient for mourning. Purely on a physical level what would a person gain if he lived many more years? What is the ultimate gain in devouring hundreds more chickens and thousands more loaves of bread? What is the overall difference if the deceased left all this to others? The Torah obligates us to mourn to emphasize the loss of the true value of life; which is the spiritual elevation a person could have gained if he were still alive. The Almighty placed him on this earth for this purpose. The person’s death should remind the mourners to fill their lives with the spiritual growth that they are capable of.
Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Life | Life | Mourn | Mourning | Purpose | Purpose | Loss | Torah | Value |
There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest wisdom within your soul and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.
There are many great truths which we do not deny, and which nevertheless we do not fully believe.
Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"
For there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience; since many have the arguments relating to what can be known, but because they lack experience they neglect the arguments, and neither avoid what is harmful nor follow what is good. For if a man who has never seen fire should prove by adequate reasoning that fire burns and injures things and destroys them, his mind would not be satisfied thereby, nor would he avoid fire, until he placed his hand or some combustible substance in the fire, so that he might prove by experience that which reasoning taught. But when he has had actual experience of combustion his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore reasoning does not suffice, but experience does.
Doubt | Experience | Intuition | Knowledge | Light | Man | Mind | Neglect | Rest | Wisdom |
Instead of rising rapidly in the beginning and flattening out later, the earnings curve of most of those who eventually became millionaires was the reverse; their income increased slowly, if at all, for many years. And then, after two to three decades, it suddenly went through the roof.
Anxiety is the poison of human life; the parent of many sins and of more miseries. In a world where everything is doubtful, and where we may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, why this restless stir and commotion of mind? Can it alter the cause or unravel the mystery of human events?
Anxiety | Anxiety | Cause | Events | Life | Life | Mind | Mystery | Wisdom | World | Blessed | Parent |
Thrift is not, as many suppose, a self repression. It is self expression, the demonstration of a will and ability to raise one's self to a higher plane of living. No depression was ever caused by people having too much money in reserve. No human being ever became a social drifter through the practice of sensible thrift.
Ability | Depression | Money | People | Practice | Reserve | Self | Thrift | Will | Wisdom |
Vocabulary is an index to a civilization, and ours is a disturbed one. That's why so many of the new words deal with war, violence, drugs, racism, and not so many with peace and prosperity.
Civilization | Peace | Prosperity | War | Wisdom | Words |