This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is much unexplored potential in each human being. We are not just flesh and bone or an amalgamation of conditionings. If this were so, our future on this planet would not be very bright. But there is infinitely more to life, and each passionate being who dares to explore beyond the fragmentary and superficial into the mystery of totality helps all humanity perceive what it is to be fully human. Revolution, total revolution, implies experimenting with the impossible. And when an individual takes a step in the direction of the new, the impossible, the whole human race travels through that individual.
Acceptance | Action | Consciousness | Cynicism | History | Indifference | Integration | Majority | People | Service | Society | Spirituality | Work | Society |
Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Humanity | Indifference | Afraid |
All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality. They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other — and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay' – no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.
Indifference | Love | Nothing |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
Body | Indifference | Opinion |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all--the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco--to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God.
Art | Books | Literature | Little | Space | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Work | Writing | Art |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I like it when people actually come, but I love it when they go.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Ever a various, changeful thing is woman
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Washington acted as the representative of the needs, the ideas, the enlightened men, the opinions of his age; he supported, not thwarted, the stirrings of intellect; he desired only what he had to desire, the very thing to which he had been called: from which derives the coherence and longevity of his work. That man who struck few blows because he kept things in proportion has merged his existence with that of his country: his glory is the heritage of civilization; his fame has risen like one of those public sanctuaries where a fecund and inexhaustible spring flows.
A thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine of little value, a kind of toy, the daydream of a visionary, a utopia -- a steamboat. The Parisians regarded the useless thing with indifference.
Can you not see that to decide to do nothing is the most wretched of all decisions?
He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquility and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.
The Lord is your Staff and Support. Do not discard it; do not be led away from the path of faith by stories invented by malice and circulated by spite.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.
If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.
Day | Difficulty | Indifference | Man | Self | Sense | Silence | Sympathy |