This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Knowledge is acquired by study and observation, but wisdom cometh by opportunity of leisure; the ripest thought comes from the mind which is not always on the stretch, but fed, at times, by a wise passiveness.
Knowledge | Leisure | Mind | Observation | Opportunity | Study | Thought | Wisdom | Wise | Thought |
Marriage is an opportunity for happiness, not a gift. It is a step bay which two imperfect individuals unite their forces in the struggle for happiness.
Marriage | Opportunity | Struggle | Wisdom |
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
It is from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
George T. Lucas, fully George Walton Lucas, Jr.
Life cannot be explained. The only reason for life is life. There is no why. We are. Life is beyond reason. One might think of life as a large organism, and we are but a small, symbiotic part of it. It is possible that on a spiritual level we are all connected in a way that continues beyond the comings and goings of various life forms. My best guess is that we share a collective spirit or life force or consciousness that encompasses and goes beyond individual life forms.
Consciousness | Force | Individual | Life | Life | Reason | Spirit | Wisdom | Think |
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.
Good | Indispensable | Opposition | Reason | Will | Wisdom | Wise |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.
Reading affords the opportunity to everyone - the poor, the rich, the humble, the great - to spend as many hours as he wishes in the company of the noblest men and women that the world has ever known.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
There are questions whose truth or untruth cannot be decided by man; all the supreme questions, all the supreme problems of value are beyond human reason... To grasp the limits of reason - only this is true philosophy.
Man | Philosophy | Problems | Reason | Truth | Wisdom | Value |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’s brain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, and must precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearances.
Contrast | Culture | Eternal | Impossibility | Man | Nature | Poetry | Reality | Reason | Truth | Wisdom | World |
Raimon Panikkar, fully Raimon Panikkar-Alemany
To look for a purpose in Life outside Life itself amounts to killing Life. Reason is given by Life, not vice versa. Life is prior to meaning... Human life is joyful interrogation. Any answer is blasphemy.
Blasphemy | Life | Life | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Wisdom | Vice |
I can endure a melancholy man, but not a melancholy child; the former, in whatever slough he may sink, can raise his eyes either to the kingdom of reason or of hope; but the little child is entirely absorbed and weighed down by one black poison-drop of the present.
Hope | Little | Man | Melancholy | Present | Reason | Wisdom | Child |
And yet we are very apt to be full of ourselves, instead of Him that made what we so much value, and but for whom we can have no reason to value ourselves. For we have nothing that we can call our own, no, not ourselves; for we are all but tenants, and at will too, of the great Lord of ourselves, and the rest of this great farm, the world that we live upon.
Lord | Nothing | Reason | Rest | Will | Wisdom | World | Value |