This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock and no man holding a long oar, ready to take your last coin. This is the real earth and the real water it contains.
The pipe, with solemn interposing puff, makes half a sentence at a time enough; the dozing sages drop the drowsy strain, then pause, and puff -- and speak, and pause again.
With filial confidence inspired, can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye, and smiling say, my father made them all!
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Schopenhauer says: Nothing gives us more harmony of accurate knowledge, and the more knowledge we to our emotions, the less control we. And nothing to protect us more control over our souls, if you want to subject everything to yourself subjected yourself to your mind. The compelling world not arouse in us admiration as compelling raised himself
Better | Evil | Good | Knowledge | Little | Mind | Nature | People | Self | System | Thinking |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
The sum of the knowable, that soil which the human spirit must till, lies between all the languages and independent of them, at their center. But man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his own modes of cognition and feeling, in other words: subjectively. Just where study and research touch the highest and deepest point, just there does the mechanical, logical use of reason - whatever in us can most easily be separated from our uniqueness as individual human beings - find itself at the end of its rope. From here on we need a process of inner perception and creation. And all that we can plainly know about this is its result, namely, that objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
If we really wanted to honor our boys, why didn’t we let them sit on the reviewing stands and make the people march those fifteen miles? They didn’t want to parade, they wanted to go home and rest.
Delusion |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
This application of the concept of statistical laws was finally formulated in the second half of the last century as the so-called statistical mechanics. In this theory, which is based on Newton's mechanics, the consequences that spring from an incomplete knowledge of a complicated mechanical system are investigated. Thus in principle it is not a renunciation of determinism. The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. .. This state of affairs is best described by saying that all particles are basically nothing but different stationary states of one and the same stuff. Thus even the three basic building-stones have become reduced to a single one. There is only one kind of matter but it can exist in different discrete stationary conditions.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
To me many of my colleagues at Time, basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like little children, knowing and clever little children, but knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else.
Belief | Delusion | Habit | Mind | Openness | Peace | People | Price | War | World |
It is though we had wanted to add to the already existing proofs of God's Existence, a new and finally convincing one: the universal destruction that follows on assuming God's non-existence.
Lending | Personality | Race | Unity | Vision |
No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as “God,” “Natural Law,” “Cosmic Primordial Force,” “Ether” or “Cosmic Orgone Energy.”
Achievement | Culture | Instinct | Man | Morality | Time | Unity | Will | Work |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I sing the Equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things; I say Nature continues—Glory continues; I praise with electric voice; for I do not see one imperfection in the universe; and I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe. O setting sun! though the time has come, I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
He seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Cultures vary greatly in their exploitation of the various senses and in the way in which they relate to their conceptual apparatus to the various senses. It has been a commonplace that the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks differed in the value they set on the auditory. The Hebrews tended to think of understanding as a kind of hearing, whereas the Greeks thought of it more as a kind of seeing, although far less exclusively as seeing than post-Cartesian Western man generally has tended to do.
Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.
Flexibility | Intention | Nothing | People | Unity | Flexibility | Crisis |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without - our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them - the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound - processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.
Self |