This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
True greatness, first of all, is a thing of the heart. It is alive with robust and generous sympathies. It is neither behind its age nor too far before it. It is up with its age, and ahead of it only just so far as to be able to lead its march. It cannot slumber, for activity is a necessity of its existence. It is no reservoir, but a fountain.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky
Ninety-nine percent of all activity is economic and practical, and only one percent is political; but the one percent is the beginning of the whole sequence.
The world of our consciousness consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous - the cosmic times and spaces, for example - whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of the mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one.
Consciousness | Example | Existence | Experience | Mind | Reality | Thinking | Time | Wisdom | World | Think |
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, or forced to do your best, will bred in you temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content, and a hundred other virtues which the idle never know.
Control | Diligence | God | Self | Self-control | Strength | Will | Wisdom | Work | God |
Not sixteen per cent of the human race is, or ever has been, engaged in any of the kinds of activity at which they excel.
Human race | Race | Wisdom |
When thou are obliged to speak, be sure to speak the truth; for equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying is the whole way to hell.
Equivocation | Hell | Lying | Truth | Wisdom |