This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The great capacity of the Jews and the Chinese, above all other peoples, to survive the cancerous attacks of dehumanized power has derived from their sense of the family; loyalty to the generations behind them and those yet to come." - Lewis Mumford
"The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music." - Lewis Thomas
"To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so we must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"To be organized and efficiently, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"It is through the intellect that the human being has the capacity of honoring God." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends." - Margaret Mead
"Happiness? It is an illusion to think that more comfort means more happiness. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed." - Margaret Storm Jameson
"The great man is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit. So long as a man's power is bound to the goal, the work, the calling, it is, in itself, neither good nor evil, only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil and corrupts the history of the world." - Martin Buber
"In what respect are we superior to brute creation, if intellect is not allowed to be the guide of passion? Brutes hope and fear, love and hate; but, without a capacity to improve, a power of turning these passions to good or evil, they neither acquire virtue nor wisdom. - Why? Because the Creator has not given them reason." - Mary Wollstonecraft
"Just as a mountain is constantly being shaped by weather, our character can be reformed by our choices. Our human capacity to reason and choose makes the formation of our character an ongoing process. Each day we can decide to be different." - Michael S. Josephson
"Our capacity to reason and our freedom to choose make us morally autonomous and, therefore, answerable for whether we honor or degrade the ethical principles that give life meaning and purpose." - Michael S. Josephson
"When Judaism speaks of immortality… its primary meaning is that man contains something independent of the flesh and surviving it; his consciousness and moral capacity; his essential personality; a soul." - Milton Steinberg
"Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession." - Napoleon Hill
"By [free will] I can either enlarge or restrict my capacity for Thy grace." - Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
"Tenderness, without a capacity of relieving, only makes the man who reels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance." - Oliver Goldsmith
"The more various our artificial necessities, the wider is our circle of pleasure; for all pleasure consists in obviating necessities as they rise; luxury, therefore, as it increases our wants, increases our capacity for happiness." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Habits are nothing but repetitions of your own thoughts, and these you have the capacity to change." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"We must conclude that education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put into a soul knowledge that was not there before - rather as if they could but sight into blind eyes. On the contrary, our argument indicates that this is a capacity which is innate in each man’s soul, and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the entire soul must be turned away from this world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which we have called the Good." - Plato NULL
"I've never met a person, I don't care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don't care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life any time he is ready and prepared to do it. Whenever he develops the desire, he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within." - Preston Bradley
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether this happens at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young, but becomes constantly more valuable regardless of physical capacity." - Samuel Ullman
"… presented a vision of the universe progressing towards a goal, the spiritual development of humanity… noosphere – the mind’s capacity to know itself." - Teilhard de Chardin, fully Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"The truth survives, the untruth perishes. Men have but little capacity for the recognition of truth at first sight, and of a hundred things which seem plausible, it is fortunate if one be true. Hence it is well that all things should be held at arm’s length and stand the scrutiny of our prejudices and interests, of our religion and our skepticism." - Thomas Brackett Reed, aka Czar Reed
"That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in a minute, as by some computations it does." - Thomas Carlyle
"As in our confidence, so is our capacity." - William Hazlitt
"He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery." - William Hazlitt
"People can only exhibit freedom in proportion to their comprehension of existence and grander realities. Only through an expanded knowledge, wisdom and the understanding of greater truths, do people have a greater capacity to express their freedom." - Alan William Smolowe
"There is a field of energy that permeates the universe. This is understood by science, and now what we're beginning to discover is that field of energy is alive. One of its qualities is sentience or consciousness, and we can interact with that field. We're not just closed off in our physical bodies. We have the capacity to interact with the larger field of consciousness; it permeates our lives and touches us day-in and day-out. If there is needless suffering happening in the world, it tinges and colors the ocean of consciousness that we swim in, and we imbibe this daily. So, if we can create a world without undue suffering--one where we're not killing off all of these species and harming one another--it will change the atmosphere of our lives." - Duane Elgin
" I think the collective unconscious is actually becoming the Collective Consciousness. With the mass media, every time we watch some event, whether it's a mass sporting event or it's the president speaking about one thing or another, we are tuning in with our collective consciousness to a happening in the world. In the past, we didn't have that ability. And so in a way, we have been awakening a capacity for reflective consciousness at a social level unbeknownst to humanity. It's an almost invisible process of bio-osmosis; we are developing a new capacity for witnessing, for being an observing species, and this is transformative." - Duane Elgin
"Aviation is proof that given, the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible. " - Eddie Rickenbacker, formally Edward Vernon "Eddie" Rickenbacker
"To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy. I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create.." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"In the conservative view human communication and interaction is limited to our sensory channels ... [but] we are linked by more subtle and encompassing connections as well...The connections that bind 'my' consciousness to the consciousness of others... are rediscovered today in controlled experiments with thought and image transference, and the effect of the mind of one individual on the body of another... Native tribes seem able to communicate beyond the range of eye and ear... In the laboratory also, modern people display a capacity for spontaneous transference of impressions and images, especially when they are emotionally close to each other... transpersonal contact includes the ability to transmit thoughts and images, and ... it is given to many if not all people... this is the finding of recent experiments... Reliable evidence is becoming available that the conscious mind of one person can produce repeatable and measurable effects on the body of another... [also] Intercessory prayer and spiritual healing, together with other mind- and intention-based experiments and practices, yield impressive evidence regarding the effectiveness of telepathic and telesomatic information- and energy-transmission. The pertinent practices produce real and measurable effects on people, and they are more and more widespread. But mainstream science has no explanation for them. Could it be that our consciousness is linked with other consciousnesses through an interconnecting Akashic Field, much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos, quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living?" - Ervin László
"The reason why we see that people of the greatest capacity are not rich, is either they despise wealth in comparison to something else, or, they are not content in getting an estate, unless they may do it in their own way, while at the same time enjoying all the pleasures and gratitude's of life." - Eustace Budgell
"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. " - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
"Forgiveness is a strange thing. It can sometimes be easier to forgive our enemies than our friends. It can be hardest of all to forgive people we love. Like all of life's important coping skills, the ability to forgive and the capacity to let go of resentments most likely take root very early in our lives." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
"We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love. Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
" It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence." - Freeman John Dyson
"Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public. " - George McGovern, fully George Stanley McGovern
"As a confirmed individualist I certainly do not wish to underrate the influence of the individual, for the masses do not lead the individual; rather, in the individual is vested the capacity to lead the masses." - Gustav Stresemann
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. " - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
"What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other." - Hans Urs von Balthasar