This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition, or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.
Destroy | Enjoyment | Excellence | Imagination | Improvement | Man | Mind | Past | Present | Will | Wisdom |
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann
It is just because no event can be past with respect to an eternal entity that an eternal entity cannot alter a past event. An omnipotent, omniscient, eternal entity can affect temporal events, but it can affect events only as they are actually occurring.
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways.
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.
Events | Experience | Future | Inevitable | Past | Wisdom |
True wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is uninstructive; without the latter it is deceptive.
Knowledge | Past | Perception | Wisdom |
Throughout history there has never been an evitable war. The greatest danger of war always lies in the widespread acceptance of its inevitability.
Everyone expects to go further than his father went; everyone expects to be better than he was born and every generation has one big impulse in its heart - to exceed all the other generations of the past in all the things that make life worth living.
Better | Father | Heart | Impulse | Life | Life | Past | Wisdom | Worth |
The meaning of life is wrapped up in what will remain after we depart. The meaning of life is to help create a better future... The meaning of life is to be mindful of the past - to always remember - in order to make certain that history’s atrocities are not repeated again and that justice will win.
Better | Future | History | Justice | Life | Life | Meaning | Order | Past | Will | Wisdom |
In war and affairs of state, many things seem to be just and reasonable at first sight; yet nothing of the kind ought to be finally decided without pondering in a hundred different lights.
The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man.
Glory | Government | Man | Object | Peace | War | Government | Happiness |