This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
What is this self inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us and urge us on to futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
For the unified mind in accord with the Way all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind’s power. Here thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value. In this world of Suchness there is neither self nor other-than-self.
Faith | Imagination | Knowledge | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | Power | Self | Thought | World |
A guilty Conscience never thinketh it self safe.
Conscience | Safe | Self | Guilty |
The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
Self |
Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
Some people say they haven't found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.
Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar... Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice. Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment... This above all: To thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Polonius at I, iii)
Censure | Day | Judgment | Man | Means | Reserve | Self | Thought | Thought |
This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
Man is like an island, a circle within circles. Man is separated from these outer circles by his mind, his beliefs, and the limitations put upon him by a life away from the Earth. The circle of man, the island of self, is the place of logic, the ‘I,’ the ego, and the physical self. That is the island that man has chosen to live within today, and in doing so he has created a prison for himself. The walls of the island prison are thick, made up of doubts, logic and lack of belief. His isolation from his greater circles of self is suffocating and prevents him from seeing life clearly and purely. It is a world of ignorance where the flesh is the only reality, the only god... Beyond man’s island of ego, his prison, lies the world of the spirit-that-moves-in-all-things, the force that is found in all things. It is a world that communicates to all entities of Creation and touches the creator. It is a circle of life that houses all man’s instinct, his deepest memory, his power to control his body and mind, and a bridge that helps man transcend flesh. It is a world that expands man’s universe and helps him to fuse himself to the earth. Most of all, it is a world that brings man to his higher self and to spiritual rapture.
Belief | Body | Control | Earth | Ego | Force | God | Ignorance | Instinct | Isolation | Life | Life | Logic | Man | Memory | Mind | Power | Prison | Reality | Self | Spirit | Universe | World |
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased. To be amiable is to be satisfied with one's self and others.
W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
We are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom... Work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunites afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.
W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self complacent is erroneous--on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
Happiness is to “become portion of that around me.”... We are happy only when the self achieves union with the not-self. Now both self and non-self are states of our consciousness.
Consciousness | Happy | Self |