This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Change challenges, relieves, frustrates, threatens, saddens or exhilarates us. Mainly it forces us to grow. It is the mechanism through which nature ensures evolution and the way God calls us home. It scares away our illusions about ourselves and others.
To study and forget is like bearing children and burying them.
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton
A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
History | Man | Mind | Nothing | Opinion | Past | Present | Study | Wisdom |
How shall man obtain conception of the majesty of the Divine...? Through the expansion of his scientific faculties; through the liberation of his imagination...; through the disciplined study of the world and of life; through the cultivation of a rich, multifarious sensitivity to every phase of being. All these desiderata require obviously the study of all the branches of wisdom, all the philosophies of life, all the ways of the diverse civilizations and doctrines of ethics and religion in every nation and tongue.
Cultivation | Ethics | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Religion | Study | Wisdom | World |
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 |
He who would be the tongue of this wide land must string his harp with chords of study iron and strike it with a toil-imbrowned hand.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.
Desire | Experience | Study | Wisdom |
The study of proverbs may be more instructive and comprehensive than the most elaborate scheme of philosophy.
Philosophy | Proverbs | Study | Wisdom |
Busy yourself as much as possible with the study of divine things, not to know them merely, but to do them; and when you close the book, look round you, look within you, to see if your hand can translate into deed something you have learned.
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL
Salvation and justice are not to be found in revolution, but in evolution through concord. Violence has ever achieved only destruction, not construction; the kindling of passions, not their pacification; the accumulation of hate and destruction, not the reconciliation of the contending parties; and it has reduced men and parties to the difficult task of building slowly after sad experience on the ruins of discord.
Evolution | Experience | Hate | Justice | Men | Reconciliation | Revolution | Salvation | Wisdom |
Demean thyself more warily in thy study than in the street. If thy public actions have a hundred witnesses, thy private have a thousand. The multitude looks but upon thy actions; thy conscience looks into them: the multitude may chance to excuse thee, if not acquire thee; thy conscience will accuse thee, if not condemn thee.
Chance | Conscience | Looks | Public | Study | Will | Wisdom |