This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
Nature I believe in. True art aims to represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal—partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me.
Aims | Art | Beauty | Extreme | Familiarity | Good | Little | Men | Self | Wisdom | Art | Realism |
Margaret Oliphant, fully Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, née Margaret Oliphant Wilson
It is often easier to justify one’s self to others than to respond to the secret doubts that arise in one’s own bosom.
The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.
Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |
Timothy Sprigge, fully Timothy L.S. Sprigge
If this is correct, all that is contained in a single divine consciousness within which an inconceivably vast number of streams of finite experience interact and interweave. When the lower level streams of experience which correspond to the basic items postulated in physics enter into appropriately complex relations with each other they form aggregates (and aggregates of aggregates) which are what living things are in themselves, and which underpin the emergence of the streams of consciousness of animals and men. Within such streams of consciousness, more particularly the human, a not self aspect, which is primarily the physical world as it is for us, confronts a self aspect, and serves as its representation of the system of interweaving streams of experience n the midst of which it exists and with which it must interact appropriately in order to survive, communicate with other similar selves, and realize its personal essence as fully as it can.
Consciousness | Experience | Men | Order | Self | System | Wisdom | World |
The biological origins of awareness... Contact, communication and recognition all take place at a very simple level - occurring even amongst social bacteria that seem to be able to recognise self from non-self.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
There is no happiness without security- I mean the prospect of being able to rely on the permanence of a state into which one has settled oneself. This assurance is to be found either in the mastering of things, or in the mastering of self which makes one independent of things.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is not more than the soul, and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, and whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, and I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, and to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, and there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, and there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe, and I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, for I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is sign'd by God's name, and I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.
Better | Body | God | Learning | Man | Men | Nothing | Object | Peace | Self | Soul | Sympathy | Will | Wisdom | Following | God | Understand |
I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.
René Bazin, fully René François Nicolas Marie Bazin
There is no need to go searching for a remedy for the evils of the time. The remedy already exists - it is the gift of one’s self to those who have fallen so low that even hope fails them. Open wide your heart.
Bayazid Bastami, also known as Abu-Yazid Al-Bistami or Tayfur Abu Yazid al-Bustami
Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God.
Forgetfulness | God | Self |
Benjamin Cardozo, fully Benjamin Nathan Cardozo
The submergence of self in the pursuit of an ideal, the readiness to spend oneself without measure, prodigally, almost ecstatically, for something intuitively apprehended as great and noble, spend oneself one know not why - some of us like to believe that this is what religion means.