This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Your subconscious mind produces in your daily life evidence of the thoughts you send back to it. The constant repetition of fear, anxiety and worry thoughts will bring upon you the same thing multiplied many times over, but the constant practice of positive thinking, making affirmations hour by hour that God is now healing your fears and worries, will bring magnificent results... You have the ability for successful living. You have the tools. The power you use is faith and the tools are your thoughts and ideas.
Ability | Anxiety | Anxiety | Evidence | Faith | Fear | God | Ideas | Life | Life | Mind | Power | Practice | Thinking | Will | Worry | God |
The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false is one of the last attainments of the human mind.
Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.
D. W. Harding, fully Denys Clement Wyatt Harding
A necessary quality for the attainment of individuality is the ability to tolerate some degree of loneliness in the sense of independent adherence to values that those around you will not support.
Ability | Attainment | Individuality | Loneliness | Sense | Will |
The purpose of growth: to maximize our ability to be loving, joyful and creative… Growth is not just about striving to be better. It is also about enjoying the moment and accepting yourself as you are (knowing that you are or will do your best to change what you can).
Ability | Better | Change | Growth | Knowing | Purpose | Purpose | Will |
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good… Either we have hope or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons… Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather and ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Ability | Chance | Good | Hope | Joy | Mind | Observation | Sense | Success | Will | Work | World |
Neither existing nor evolving is a purpose – these are simply states of affairs. Demonstrating a trend toward complexity does not demonstrate purpose – it demonstrates only what happens when something new is added to something old. Nor does the ability to learn then apply what has been learned prove that life has a purpose.
The tyranny of conformity tends to deprive man of his inner identity, of his ability to stand still in the midst of flux, to remain a person in the midst of a crowd.
Ability | Conformity | Man | Tyranny |
Life’s development has been much harder to definitely trace than that of the universe. This is because biology’s countless combinations and permutations are exceedingly convoluted compared to the linearity of physics or the predictability of chemistry. Life’s ability to mutate and change over successive generations has meant that investigators cannot simply extrapolate backwards to determine what previously existed, nor look forward and predict what might result.
The indivisible is not to be put into compartments. Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspects of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable. Which of our methods of measuring could we apply to this eddying mass that is the universe? In the presence of the profundities our sole ability is to dream. Our conception, quickly winded, cannot follow creation, that vast breath.
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
Control | Discretion | Education | Enough | People | Safe | Society | Society | Think |
Living entails (and is inseparable from) exploiting the environment for resources. Exploiting therefore, at its roots, is constructive. Indeed, the exploitive ability of the creative has improved the quality of life for billions. We should never fear our exploitive nature, but we must manage its excesses.
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
Autobiographical memories are particularly prone to inaccuracy. Traumatic events embed memories in a powerful but somewhat fragmentary way. Neurological disorders and drugs can disrupt the brain’s ability to distinguish between true and false memories and beliefs. The brain perceives reality and transforms it into an extraordinary range of personal, ethical, and creative premises that we use to build meaning, value, spirituality, and truth into our lives.
Ability | Distinguish | Events | Meaning | Reality | Spirituality | Truth |
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
The roots of a child’s ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child’s having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return.
Ability | Safe | Companionship | Child |
Robert Edward Rubin, aka Eddy Rubin
Relying on politics for your sense of who you are greatly impedes your ability to remain true to yourself, your views, and your values.
It is in deeds that man becomes aware of what his life really is, of his power to harm and to hurt, to wreck and to ruin; of his ability to derive joy and to bestow it upon others; to relieve and to increase his own and other people’s tensions. It is in the employment of his will, not in reflection, that he meets his own self as it is; not as he should like it to be.
Ability | Deeds | Harm | Joy | Life | Life | Man | People | Power | Reflection | Self | Will | Deeds |