This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Margaret Young, born Margaret Youngblood
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.
Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.
Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne
Governments which suppress freedom of speech... act like children who shut their eyes in order not to be seen.
Children | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Order | Speech | Wisdom |
William J. Broad and Nicholas J. Wade
Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory of law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.
Before you think of retiring from the world, be sure you are fit for retirement; in order to which it is necessary that you have a mind so composed by prudence, reason, and religion, that it may bear being looked into; a turn to rural life, and a love of study.
Life | Life | Love | Mind | Order | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Religion | Retirement | Study | Wisdom | World | Think |
Bette Davis, Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis
Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington. He was no Veiled Prophet. He never acted a part. Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us - a fair and open manuscript. He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it. He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech - the consummate tact of direct attention. Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service. There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime.
Attention | Character | Charity | Conduct | Crime | Difficulty | Diplomacy | Events | Giving | Intrigue | Life | Life | Means | Men | Mystery | Order | Power | Providence | Purity | Selfishness | Service | Speech | Tact | Understanding | Wisdom | Wise |
True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. To cast away the old is not of necessity to attain the new. To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"
Conservatism | Good | Necessity | Order | Power | Progress | Question | Wisdom | Old |
In the first place, the human mind, no matter how highly trained, is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many tongues. The little child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind to God. And because I believe this, I am not an atheist.
Books | God | Little | Mind | Order | Plan | Universe | Wisdom | Child | Understand |
How extraordinary is the situation of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without going deeper than our daily life, it is plain we exist for our fellow men, in the first place for those upon whose smiles and welfare our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally but to whose destinies we are bound by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.
Day | Life | Life | Men | Order | Sympathy | Wisdom | Happiness |
Fred Dretske, fully Frederick "Fred" Irwin Dretske
In the beginning there was information. The word came later. the transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.