This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
An ounce of discretion is worth a pound of learning.
Character | Discretion | Learning | Worth |
Just as a tested and rugged virtue of the moral hero is worth more than the lovely, tender, untried innocence of the child, so is the massive strength of a soul that has conquered truth for itself worth more than the soft peach-bloom faith of a soul that takes truth on trust.
Character | Faith | Hero | Innocence | Soul | Strength | Trust | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Worth |
The meaning of life is experienced when we are in touch with our unique essence, sometimes called the divine spark within... It is both individual and universal. When we are fully aware of this unique inner radiance, we feel what it is to be utterly alive. We experience unconditional love. We sense complete safety because that spark also connects us to the universal divinity within all things.
Character | Divinity | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Sense | Unique |
Norman O. Brown, fully Norman Oliver Brown
What education does is to put a series of filters over your awareness so that year by year... you experience less and less.
Awareness | Character | Education | Experience | Awareness |
I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth.
Character | Earth | Expectation | Experience | Heaven | Love | Soul | Expectation | Friends |
I had the opportunity to deliver babies... In each of these numinous moments, I knew that life had meaning; each experience was accompanied by an upwelling of gratitude and humility. These moments, which can be called an experience of the self, or archetype of meaning, are akin to the act of finally seeing the Holy Grail after a long quest... It is through these moments of grace and gratitude that we acquire a sense of meaning and a desire to live a meaningful life. The personal challenge is now.
Challenge | Character | Desire | Experience | Grace | Gratitude | Humility | Life | Life | Meaning | Opportunity | Self | Sense |
Yosef Leib Bloch, fully R' Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch
Young people imagine there is great value in fame. Those with life experience know that in truth publicity is extremely short-lived. The nature of the world is that every piece of news makes an impression for only a very short time. After those few minutes the impression is erased and quickly forgotten. It is as if it never was.
Character | Experience | Fame | Impression | Life | Life | Nature | News | People | Time | Truth | World | Value |
Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL
You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.
Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |