This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Problems linked to illness, such as psychic crises, but also pains of a physiological nature (fever, migraines, rheumatic pains) can be assumed to be just so many initiatory trials. Uncovering the religious significance of illness and physical pain constitutes in effect shamanism’s essential contribution to the history of spirit.
[Written] history is largely the glorification of the iniquities of the triumphant.
History |
We cannot leave behind us the sins of our past. We must not forget that nothing disappears. Everything is eternal. Everything that has been is still in existence. The whole history of humanity is the “history of crime”... Man must go back, seek for, and destroy the causes of evil however far back they lie. It is only in this idea that the hint of the possibilities of a general evolution can be found. It is only in this idea that the possibility of changing the karma of humanity lies, because changing the karma means changing the past... There will be no possibility of thinking of evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving man to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there.
Crime | Destroy | Eternal | Evil | Evolution | Existence | History | Humanity | Man | Means | Nothing | Past | Present | Struggle | Thinking | Will |
R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
In the later nineteenth century the idea of progress became almost an article of faith. This conception was a piece of sheer metaphysics derived from evolutionary naturalism and foisted upon history by the temper of the age.
The study of history is in the truest sense an education and a training for political life... The most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.
Dignity | Education | Fortune | History | Learning | Life | Life | Method | Sense | Study | Training | Vicissitudes |
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
To be a man of destiny is to arrive at a point in history when the only gift you have to offer has suddenly become relevant.
Most of the great results in history are brought about by discreditable means.
All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
The most fugitive word or deed, the more air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character, and the remote results of character are civil history and events that shake or settle the world. If you act, you show character; if you sit still, you show it; if you sleep, you show it.
We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it, let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power.
Fear | History | Hope | Love | Nothing | Power | Soul | Space | Time | Will |
All history is the record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded.
Balance | Doctrine | Equity | Evil | Force | God | Good | History | Inspiration | Justice | Law | Life | Life | Omnipresence | Sentiment | Soul | Strength | Universe | World | God | Value |
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man... and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet.
The history of man is a series of conspiracies to win from nature some advantage without paying for it.