This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The end of worship amongst men is power. For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerful, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his power greater. But God has no ends: the worship we do him proceeds from our duty and is directed according to our capacity by those rules of honor that reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of damage, or in thankfulness for good already received from them." - Thomas Hobbes
"Responsibility walks hand in hand with capacity and power." - Jack Holland
"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"We are the standard-bearers in the only really authentic revolution, the democratic revolution against tyrannies. Our strength is not to be measured by our military capacity alone, by our industry, or by our technology. We will be remembered, not for the power of our weapons, but for the power of our compassion, our dedication to human welfare." - Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey
"All forms of the corporeal world are transitory, [but] for pure existence there is only a passing away of which it has no knowledge. Foundering requires knowledge, and than a reaction to it... Man alone can founder, and this capacity is to him not unequivocal: it challenges him to react to it." - Karl Jaspers, fully Karl Theodor Jaspers
"We receive love - from our children as well as others - not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love. And our capacity to love depends, in turn, upon our prior capacity to be persons in our own right. To love means, essentially, to give; and to give requires a maturity of self-feeling. Love is shown in the statement of Spinoza's... that truly loving God does not involve a demand for love in return. It is the attitude referred to by the artist Joseph Bender: "To produce art requires that the artist be able to love - that is to give without thought of being rewarded."" -
"A tutor should not be continually thundering instruction into the ears of his pupil, as if he were pouring it though a funnel, but induce him to think, to distinguish, and to find out things for himself; sometimes opening the way, at other times leaving it for him to open; and so accommodate his precepts to the capacity of his pupil." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"It is clear that property in itself owes allegiance to no particular form of government, and is bound by no dynastic or legal ties. Its politics may be summed up in a single word: exploitation, or even anarchy. It is the most formidable enemy and most treacherous ally of any form of power. In short, in its relation to the State it is governed by only one principle, one sentiment, one concern: self-interest, or egoism... That is why all governments, all utopias, and all Churches distrust property... We can conclude that property is the greatest existing revolutionary force, with an unequaled capacity for setting itself against authority." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"[Paraphrase from “Brain and Mind” article] “Local” healing reflects information from subtle bioenergy fields. By contrast, healing that appears non-local in space and time may be mediated by “information associated with conscious intention”... In electromagnetic healing... the living human organism contains many highly sensitive natural oscillators that join to form a collective “biofield.” This field is “a collective property of the organism and cannot be reduced to biomolecular events.” In this case, information is transmitted by external fields of similar frequency, with healing occurring through a “tuning” effect... “Information is about relationship and exists only in relationship.” Therefore, information grounded in love - “the highest-quality relationship” - may produce healing by overcoming information originated from the more mechanical levels of physical organization... “For science and medicine to embrace life’s full capacity and the full human potential we need to go beyond mechanical concepts that were developed for machines.”" - Beverly Rubik
"Capacity without education is deplorable." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"Experience suggests that the first rule of politics is never to say never. The ingenious human capacity for maneuver and compromise may make acceptable tomorrow what seems outrageous or impossible today." - William V. Shannon, fully William Vincent Shannon
"The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life." - Robert Penn Warren
"The final test of democracy is its capacity to breed leaders." - Alfred E. Wiggam
"Our task as we grow older in a rapidly advancing science, is to retain the capacity of joy in discoveries which correct older ideas, and to learn from our pupils as we teach them." - Hans Zinnser
"The man of least capacity is the one who shows himself incapable of self-correction." - Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, simply known as Ali NULL
"Beyond the narrow category of occupation, the purpose of our life is to develop our capacity to love. Our purpose is to create life out of who we are and who we are becoming." - Carol Adrienne
"Forgiveness. The experience of reconciliation following upon some breach of trust, marked on the one side by the acknowledgement of wrongdoing and the desire to make amends and on the other side by the capacity to understand and the willingness to resume friendly relations." - Anton Theophilus Boisen
"Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death." - Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
"The enrichment of meaning is the enrichment of feeling, and the genuine enrichment of feeling capacity is both quantitative and qualitative. We must enhance our emotional life quantitatively and qualitatively." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"Whether or not you decide to emulate that which you have come to understand through empathetic identification, you will never be quite the same again. In learning to think and to feel, to understand and to value more like another you will have grown in your own self-understanding and in your capacity to speak and interact with others. You, and that which you are now able to embrace, may well find in one another nurture, respect, protection, and enrichment. It is in such qualities of living that true meaning will be encountered, however tentative and fluctuating that meaning may be. It is in the very midst of the flux of the meaningful that its perpetuation and its renewal is to be found." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"The glory of human nature lies in our seeming capacity to exercise conscious control of our own destiny." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"Leadership is generally defined as the capacity to make things happen that would otherwise not happen." - Thomas Cronin, fully Thomas Edward Cronin
"What you believe matters less than your capacity for belief - and your willingness to translate belief into constructive action." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole
"The test of organization is not genius. It is the capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
"Humor is one of God’s most marvelous gifts. Humor give us smiles, laughter, and gaiety. Humor reveals the roses and hides the thorns. Humor makes our heavy burden light and smooths the rough spots in our pathways. Humor endows us with the capacity to clarify the obscure, to simplify the complex, to deflate the pompous, to chastise the arrogant, to point a moral, and to adorn a tale." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
"The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it." - Cyril Bentham Falls
"Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty." - John Finley
"Whatever complaints the neurotic patient may have, whatever symptoms he may present are rooted in his inability to love, if we mean by love a capacity for the experience of concern, responsibility, respect, and understanding of another person and the intense desire for that other person’s growth." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Every one of us is endowed at birth with all sorts of magnificent possibilities and potentialities. There is a capacity for idealism, a yearning for truth and beauty and nobility, a sensitivity to the hurt of others and to the dreams and needs of our fellow man. In the hopeful dawn of youth we feel these stirrings within us and we promise to bring them to life. And yet so often as the years pass by we permit these promises to be swept under the rug of expediency. We chalk them up to immaturity and we go on to live “more realistically.”" - Sidney Greenberg
"Thinking is a processing device with great pragmatic value; however, it presumes that it knows the data, but it actually has no innate capacity to know." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"Whereas Truth is complete and unchanging, on the contrary, man’s understanding and capacity for comprehension significantly advances and changes in all areas of knowledge. With it, significance and meaning become contextualized so that, although truth does not change, man’s understanding of it certainly does." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"We humans have the capacity to change the world with acts of love and kindness. Let’s start by teaching our children the importance of compassion." - Goldie Hawn, fully Goldie Jeanne Hawn
"The power of bureaucracy is mainly passive, not active. IT consists in the capacity to withhold needed services rather than in the capacity to oppose political superiors directly." - Hugh Heclo
"If no charismatic emerges, people may be truly bereft and lost in a sea of forces and pressures beyond their adaptive capacity. The society may die. If someone does emerge, the people may understandably attribute his rise to “divine grace.” Indeed, if he exercises leadership, he may well save his community and help it to renew itself. First, he binds people together by powerfully articulating their values, hopes, and pains. Second, he weaves their hopes into some image of the future. And third, he provides energy, strategy, and faith that the vision can be realized." - Ronald A. Heifetz
"Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The saint’s willingness to suffer results in an integrated, balanced personality; it liberates the capacity for love." - Caryll Houselander
"To wed is to bring not only our worldly goods but every potential capacity to create more values in living together… In become one these two create a new world that had never existed before." - Paul E. Johnson
"We are no more bankrupt in our capacity for finding God than in our capacity for finding harmony, or beauty, or moral goodness, or truth. We shall not find all there is of any of these values, but all we do is find is real, and is good to live by. So also with our findings of God, they do not exhaust His being. They do not carry us to the full height of all that He is. But what we have proves to be solid building material for life-purposes, and every spiritual gain that is achieved makes the next one more possible and more sure." -
"Nonviolence means that we will match your capacity to inflict pain with our capacity to endure it… We have the choice in this world today between nonviolence and nonexistence." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"We are not born in our full development but with a capacity for good an evil; we are begotten as well without virtue as without vice, and before the activity of our own personal will there is nothing in man but what God has stored in him." - Pelagius NULL
"An open mind should be more than a catch-all receptacle. It should have a screening mechanism to keep out the trivial, a sorting capacity to organize ideas and reconcile contradictions, and a critical tool to help us decide what we believe. That’s the difference between a mind that receives information and a mind that thinks." - Letty Cottin Pogrebin