This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We suffer because we feel we are giving more than we receive. We suffer because our love is going unrecognized. We suffer because we are unable to impose our own rules… We tend to seek captivity because we are used to seeing freedom as something that has neither frontiers nor responsibilities… Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what we are doing; but it becomes a curse when its sole use is to stop us thinking about the meaning of life.
Freedom | Giving | Love | Meaning | Thinking | Work | Think |
Collective madness is called sanity… Comparing is impoverishing our own experience. There is meaning to our suffering, if we rise above it… Cry if you need to, it's good to cry out all your tears, because only then you will be able to smile again… Deal with the pitfalls of life the same way that it deals with the pitfalls of the road instead of the curse the place where it is located. First try to know the cause of your falling?
Cause | Good | Life | Life | Madness | Meaning | Need | Smile | Will |
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
You are right, he had said. Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself. That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.
Love | Meaning | Understand |
This conflict with the sacred is what gives us the blessing and makes us grow up… When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you… To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life… To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation… To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God… Today don't beg, don't ask, just thank God in silence for all the blessings in your life… To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world… To injure your opponent is to injure yourself.
Blessings | Day | Destiny | Experience | God | Love | Meaning | Need | Sacred | Silence | Tomorrow | God | Understand |
Percy W. Bridgman, fully Percy Williams Bridgman
Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.
Percy W. Bridgman, fully Percy Williams Bridgman
The man in the street will, therefore, twist the statement that the scientist has come to the end of meaning into the statement that the scientist has penetrated as far as he can with the tools at his command, and that there is something beyond the ken of the scientist. This imagined beyond, which the scientist has proved he cannot penetrate, will become the playground of the imagination of every mystic and dreamer. The existence of such a domain will be made the basis of an orgy of rationalizing. It will be made the substance of the soul; the spirits of the dead will populate it; God will lurk in its shadows; the principle of vital processes will have its seat here; and it will be the medium of telepathic communication. One group will find in the failure of the physical law of cause and effect the solution of the age-long problem of the freedom of the will; and on the other hand the atheist will find the justification of his contention that chance rules the universe.
Cause | Chance | Contention | Existence | Failure | Freedom | God | Imagination | Justification | Law | Man | Meaning | Will | Failure | God |
Those who can truly be accounted brave are those who best know the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then go out, undeterred, to meet what is to come.
Percy W. Bridgman, fully Percy Williams Bridgman
On careful examination the physicist finds that in the sense in which he uses language no meaning at all can be attached to a physical concept which cannot ultimately be described in terms of some sort of measurement. A body has position only in so far as its position can be measured; if a position cannot in principle be measured, the concept of position applied to the body is meaningless, or in other words, a position of the body does not exist. Hence if both the position and velocity of electron cannot in principle be measured, the electron cannot have the same position and velocity; position and velocity as expressions of properties which an electron can simultaneously have are meaningless.
You can't just change how you think or the that way you act -- you must change the way that you will. You must gain control over the patterns that govern your mind: your worldview, your beliefs about what you deserve and what's possible. That's the zone of fundamental change, strength, and energy -- and the true meaning of courage.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Without its meanings, a book --say Plato's Republic-- simply becomes a physical (paper) object possessed of a certain geometrical form, with certain physical and chemical properties which are noticeable even to mice and which they may nibble now and then. On the other hand, the meaning of Plato's Republic can be objectified and "materialized" not only in the paper book, but through quite different physical media, such as phonograph records, or air-waves when it is just read aloud or sung, or other physical "vehicles". Physically and biologically there are no human organisms that are "kings", "patriarchs", "popes", "generals", "scientists", "laborers", "peasants", "merchants", "prisoners", "criminals", "heroes", "saints", and so on. All these and thousands of other 'meanings' are superimposed upon the biological organisms by the sociocultural world or by persons and groups functioning not only as physical objects and biological organisms but mainly as 'mindful human personalities,' as bearers, creators, and agents of 'immaterial' meanings, values and norms. Thus any phenomenon that is an 'incarnation' or 'objectification' of mind and meanings superimposed upon its physical and biological properties is by definition a sociocultural phenomenon.
Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams… Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution.
Allegories | Death | Expectation | Fate | Feelings | Hope | Ideas | Impression | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Nothing | Prison | Thought | World | Fate | Afraid | Expectation | Old | Think | Thought |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it... This then, is the basic meaning of a learning organization -an organization that is continuously expanding its capacity to create its future. Survival learning or what is more often called adaptive learning is important - indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, adaptive learning must be joined by generative learning, learning that enhances our capacity to create.
Capacity | Important | Learning | Meaning | Organization | Relationship | Survival | World |
Unless we respect the reality of the inner world, commensurate in importance with that of the external world, we are not equipped to understand the full meaning of leadership nor are we able to improve it dramatically, radically. Seeing only half of reality makes us only half a leader. Acknowledging only fifty percent of what is true, gives us a maximum of fifty percent effectiveness as a leader.
Meaning | Reality | Respect | Respect | Leadership | Understand |
To have courage means to claim your freedom, to reconnect with your will power, to reach the source of your resoluteness and determination as a person ... Seizing that freedom, claiming that truth, actually living out our lives in the experience of our freedom means being wiling to face grave anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt. It means facing guilt, anger, and depression -- what Saint John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul" and Jonas called "the belly of the whale." It means that we accept pain as natural to growth, as the actual feeling of maturation. We recognize that the meaning of life is to be deep rather than to have fun, to understand rather than be entertained, to see rather than to be blind. We come face-to-face with our self-deception, with how we deny our true nature. We discover the perniciousness of ignorance and the worthlessness of superficiality. And these become emotional insights and experienced confirmations.
Courage | Depression | Determination | Experience | Freedom | Grave | Ignorance | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Pain | Will | Understand |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Throughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive. ...our word "school"--and its equivalent in all European languages--derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure."
Meaning |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.
Giving kindness does us as much good as receiving it. . . . The true benefit of kindness is being kind. Perhaps more than any other factor, kindness gives meaning and value to our life, raises us above our troubles and our battles, and makes us feel good about ourselves.
I recognized at once that we had never understood the meaning of these words, so common and yet so sacred: Justice, equity, liberty; that concerning each of these principles our ideas have been utterly obscure.
Ideas | Meaning | Principles |