This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The paths are many, but the goal is one. Don't you see how many roads there are to the Kaaba? For some the road starts from Rome, for others from Syria, from Persia, or China; some come by the sea from India and Yemen. If you are considering different roads, the variety is immense and the difference infinite; if you consider the goal, however, they are all harmony and are one. The hearts of each and every one are fixed on the Kaaba… Each heart has an overriding attachment-a passionate love for the Kaaba-and in that there is no room for contradiction. That attachment to the Kaaba cannot be called 'impiety' or 'faith': it is not mingled with the various paths we have mentioned. Once the travelers arrive at the Kaaba, all quarreling and vicious squabbling about the different paths-this person saying to that You're wrong! You're a blasphemer! and the other shouting back in kind-simply vanish; they realize that what they were all fighting about was the roads only, and that there goal was one.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
This phantom world gave you false signs but you turned from the illusion and journeyed to the land of truth.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The wave of At-last came along and caulked the body's ship; when the ship is wrecked once more, the turn of union and encounter will come.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
If you are a man of learning, read something classic, a history of the human struggle and don't settle for mediocre verse.
I believe that you can combine biblical principles and good business practices. I testified before Congress…on how to be honest and successful at the same time.
Business | Character | Experience | People | Reflection | Teach | Training | Work | Business |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
You should strive in your prayer for a pure conscience, a will that is wholly with God, and a mind truly set upon Him.
Attention | Awareness | Desire | Experience | Faith | Father | God | Love | Order | Possessions | Reflection | Regard | Soul | Understanding | Wants | Will | God | Awareness | Understand |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
Life | Life | Man | Reflection | Regard | Resolution | Time |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Pity is not natural to man. Children and savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; but we have not pity unless we wish to relieve his. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and, finding it late, bid the coachman make haste, when he whips his horses I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist; no, sir; I wish him to drive on.
Reflection | Old |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
Consciousness | Heart | Reflection | Thought | Tragedy | Thought |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
Reflection | Smile |
True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights—and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks, one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller, usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well—magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?
Appearance | Insight | Little | Price | Reflection | Time | World |
In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language. What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!
Reflection | Right |
All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. humility gives it its power. if you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them. if you want to lead the people, you must learn how to follow them.
Courtesy | Education | Giving | Good | Intelligence | Life | Life | Love | People | Proficiency | Purpose | Purpose | Reflection | Smile | Time | Wit | Think | Value |
Motions from Satan will thrust themselves in with our most raised and angelical frames; he loves to take off the edge of our spirits from God; he acts but after the old rate; he from the first envied God an obedience from man, and envied man the felicity of communion with God; he is unwilling God should have the honor of worship, and that we should have the fruit of it; he hath himself lost it, and therefore is unwilling we should enjoy it; and being subtle, he knows how to make impressions upon us suitable to our inbred corruptions, and assault us in the weakest part. He knows all the avenues to get within us (as he did in the temptation of Eve), and being a spirit, he wants not a power to dart them immediately upon our fancy; and being a spirit, and therefore active and nimble, he can shoot those darts faster than our weakness can beat them off.
Enough | God | Good | Law | Men | Reflection | Rule | Service | Thought | Time | Will | God | Think | Thought |
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.
Ego | Knowing | Means | Reflection |
Experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms [of government], those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Reason | Reflection | Will |
In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them
Experience | Mother | Principles | Reflection | Space | Will |