This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
In the Platonic sense, ideas were the patterns according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world.
Distinction | Knowledge | Object | Philosophy | Science | Thinking |
Justifying faith is not a naked assent to the truths of the gospel.
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
People |
The most general elements and workings of the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with for his purposes.
We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
Human nature | Nature |
Read whatever chapter of Scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it -- yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchanged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon Him.
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.
Art | Cost | History | Human nature | Law | Mission | Nations | Nature | Need | Time | Work | Art |
With the civilized man contentment is a myth. From the cradle to the grave he is forever longing and striving after something better, an indefinable something, some new object yet unattained.
It is in vain to torment oneself over sufferings that one cannot alleviate.
Men | Self-knowledge |
God grant indeed thy words are not for nought! Then shalt thou save me, since for many a day to such a dreadful life I have been brought: nor will I spare with all my heart to pay what man soever takes my grief away; ah! I will love thee, if thou lovest me but well enough my saviour now to be.
Care | Day | Fear | Hate | Hope | Labor | Life | Life | Little | Maxims | Men | Nothing | Pain | People | Rest | Time | Will |
If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.
Vision |
Few men are so clever as to know all the mischief they do.
Chance |
All women seem by nature to be coquettes.
Self-love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them; and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.
People |
We are easily comforted for the misfortunes of our friends, when those misfortunes give us an occasion of expressing our affection and solicitude.
Some persons of weak understanding are so sensible of that weakness, as to be able to make a good use of it.
People |