This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
We are capable of finding unending meaning in a world of constant, shimmering, sometimes threatening change. The task is to keep the question of life in question, and to find in it an unending source of joy and possibility, even in the darkest of times. It is within the constant overcoming of our own limitations and habits, and of the established views of our age, that passive happiness and unreflective contentment are lost, then to be replaced by joyful activity and a glimpse of a broader, more enriching, and more responsible awareness than we have been capable of before.
Age | Awareness | Change | Contentment | Joy | Life | Life | Meaning | Question | World | Awareness | Happiness |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
If we persist in encouraging and educating only the intellect in our schools, we will inevitably create an instrumental conception of life, in which all human activity will be valued as a means to an end, never for itself.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is between one person and another is emptiness, nothingness, a space or field in which we can meet, talk, love, hate, hurt, nurture, encourage, and otherwise engage in ethically significant activity with one another. The between is the place wherein we are able to interact with one another, and it is a field of possibility, an opportunity as much as an emptiness to fill. Leaving the notion of emptiness to one side for the present, the betweenness of men and women works itself out in the way called “ethics,” which occasions and is the description of the consensual rules and structures of social existence.
Ethics | Existence | Hate | Love | Men | Opportunity | Present | Space |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The bare fact is that truth cannot be tolerant and cannot admit compromise or limitations that scientific research looks on the whole field of human activity as its own, and must adopt an uncompromisingly critical attitude towards any other power that seeks to usurp any part of its province.
Joel S. Goldsmith, fully Joel Solomon Goldsmith
God must become an activity in our consciousness.
Consciousness | God |
Could the mind have an existence entirely independent of the central nervous system?... Scientific evidence that not only was her brain not working, it specifically demonstrated the absence of all cortical activity when these conversations actually took place. So where could these brand-new memories have been created?... Imagine the implications of the notion that quanta of conscious energy could exist independently in the Universe, able to enter from anywhere, at any time.
Absence | Energy | Evidence | Existence | Mind | System | Time | Universe |
The transformation from non-living to living requires two steps. First, environmental sources must provide the energy needed to add an atom or two (also taken from the environment) to a molecular complex. The second step, the process is reversed; the added atoms and energy have to be returned to the environment – otherwise nothing more than a chemical activity is occurring. Thus, right at life’s beginning, natural selection seems inevitable.
Beginning | Energy | Inevitable | Life | Life | Nothing | Right |
The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.
Values are goals which behavior strives to realize. Any activity which is oriented toward the accomplishment of some end is a value-oriented activity.
Accomplishment | Behavior | Goals |
The dominant values of activity and productivity, the overwhelming importance of close family ties as well as friendships, the reliance on good health, and now, in old age, the concern with the depletion of one’s life savings and the fear of senility and dependence are commonly held attitudes…
Age | Dependence | Family | Fear | Good | Health | Life | Life | Old age | Old |
Prayer is one human activity where any inner suggestion of triumph, any shy satisfaction is most likely to be false.
Prayer |
One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing.
Art | Beauty | Invention | Need | Novels | Reading | Television | Art | Beauty | Understand |
At particular epochs of their life, [children] reveal an intense and extraordinary interest in certain objects and exercises, which one might look for in vain at a later age… Such attention is not the results of mere curiosity; it is more like a burning passion. A keen emotion first rises from the depths of the unconscious, and sets in motion a marvelous creative activity in contact with the outside world, thus building up consciousness.
Age | Attention | Children | Consciousness | Curiosity | Life | Life | Passion | World |
We are not born in our full development but with a capacity for good an evil; we are begotten as well without virtue as without vice, and before the activity of our own personal will there is nothing in man but what God has stored in him.
Capacity | Evil | God | Good | Man | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
The most striking [way in which children respond to external influences] and one that is almost like a magic wand for opening the gate to the normal expression of a child’s natural gifts is activity concentrated on some task that requires movement of the hands guided by the intellect.
When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of being at once excessive and identical with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me.