This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
If in spite of these facts we wish to maintain that mysticism is ultimately the source and essence of all religion, we shall have on our hands a set of problems very similar to those which beset the mystical theory of ethics. We shall have to maintain that mystical consciousness is latent in all men but is in most men submerged below the surface of consciousness. Just as it throws up into the upper consciousness influences which appear in the form of ethical feelings, so must its influences appear there in the form of religious impulses. And these in turn will give rise to the intellectual constructions which are the various creeds... The general conclusion regarding the relations between mysticism on the one hand and the area of organized religions (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) on the other is that mysticism is independent of all of them in the sense that it can exist without any of them. But mysticism and organized religion tend to be associated with each other and to become linked together because both look beyond earthly horizons to the Infinite and Eternal, and because both share the emotions appropriate to the sacred and the holy.
Absolute | Birth | Character | Consciousness | Death | Despair | Effort | Era | Faith | Individual | Influence | Man | Means | Mystical | Philosophy | Position | Power | Reality | Reason | Spirit | Struggle | Thought | Truth | Will | Wonder | Thought |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
The essential character of Neo-Platonism comes out in its theory of the mystical exaltation of the subject to God. It is the extremity of subjectivism, the forcing of the individual subject to the centre of the universe, to the position of the Absolute Being. And it follows naturally upon the heels of Scepticism. In the Sceptics all faith in the power of thought and reason had finally died out. They {377} took as their watchword the utter impotence of reason to reach the truth. From this it was but a step to the position that, if we cannot attain truth by the natural means of thought, we will do so by a miracle. If ordinary consciousness will not suffice, we will pass beyond ordinary consciousness altogether. Neo-Platonism is founded upon despair, the despair of reason. It is the last frantic struggle of the Greek spirit to reach, by desperate means, by force, the point which it felt it had failed to reach by reason. It seeks to take the Absolute by storm. It feels that where sobriety has failed, the violence of spiritual intoxication may succeed. It was natural that philosophy should end here. For philosophy is founded upon reason. It is the effort to comprehend, to understand, to grasp the reality of things intellectually. Therefore it cannot admit anything higher than reason. To exalt intuition, ecstasy, or rapture, above thought--this is death to philosophy. Philosophy in making such an admission, lets out its own life-blood, which is thought. In Neo-Platonism, therefore, ancient philosophy commits suicide. This is the end. The place of philosophy is taken henceforth by religion. Christianity triumphs, and sweeps away all independent thought from its path. There is no more philosophy now till a new spirit of enquiry and wonder is breathed into man at the Renaissance and the Reformation. Then the new era begins, and gives birth to a new philosophic impulse, under the influence of which we are still living. But to reach that new era of philosophy, the human spirit had first to pass through the arid wastes of Scholasticism.
Age | Aims | Control | Effort | Faith | God | Inquiry | Invention | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | People | Pleasure | Principles | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Science | Spirit | Time | Universe | Vision | World | God |
Since beauty is honoured all over the Empire, How could Xi Shi remain humbly at home? -- Washing clothes at dawn by a southern lake -- And that evening a great lady in a palace of the north: Lowly one day, no different from the others, The next day exalted, everyone praising her. No more would her own hands powder her face Or arrange on her shoulders a silken robe. And the more the King loved her, the lovelier she looked, Blinding him away from wisdom. ...Girls who had once washed silk beside her Were kept at a distance from her chariot. And none of the girls in her neighbours' houses By pursing their brows could copy her beauty.
Affront | Cause | Day | Effort | Looks | Men | Retirement | Right | World | Youth | Youth | Old |
O God, grant that today I may not disappoint any friend; I may not grieve any loved one; I may not fail anyone to whom I have a duty; I may not shame myself. Grant that today I may do my work with honesty and fidelity; I may take my pleasure in happiness and purity. Grant that today I may lead no one astray; I may not make goodness and faith harder for anyone. Help me today to be a help and example to all; to bring strength and encouragement wherever I am.
William Cohen, fully William Sebastian Cohen
The more reliant we become upon computers and information systems, the more vulnerable we become to cyber-terrorists who will conceive unlimited ways to cripple our infrastructure, our power grids, our banking systems, our financial markets, our space based communications systems.
Administration | Belief | Challenge | Effort | Evidence | Intelligence | Kill | War | Think |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Says Spinoza: When it seems to us anything in the nature funny or silly, obscure or evil it is because we do not have only little knowledge of things, and we are ignorant system of nature and cohesion as a whole, and we want to hold things according to our thinking and our opinions, even though what he sees as our mind bad or evil is not evil or bad for the system and the laws of nature comprehensive college. But in relation to the laws of our own nature separate. As for the word of good and evil, it does not indicate something positive in itself, because the one thing the same may be simultaneously good or evil, or neither such as music, for example, it is better for Almnaqbd self evil for Alnaúh sad and lost people seemed to be his. It is not good or evil for the Dead
Dispute | Effort | Fighting | Goals | Hero | Story | Happiness |
Observing this years ago I formulated a question? Is it possible to build an agriculture based on the prairie as standard or model? I saw a sharp contrast between the major features of the wheat field and the major features of the prairie. The wheat field features annuals in monoculture; the prairie features perennials in polyculture, or mixtures. Because all of our high-yielding crops are annuals or are treated as such, crucial questions must be answered. Can perennialism and high yield go together? If so, can a polyculture of perennials outyield a monoculture of perennials? Can such an ecosystem sponsor its own fertility? Is it realistic to think we can manage such complexity adequately to avoid the problem of pests outcompeting us?
Effort | Good | Important | Intelligence | Need | Noise | Tradition | Wisdom |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and, hence, their conflict is irrepressible.
Day | Effort | Enemy | Exaggeration | Play | Terror | Will |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Now, the Communists recognized at once (or, more probably, after they had stirred things up a bit) that Senator McCarthy is a political godsend.
Change | Effort | Grace | Individual | Mind | Opinion | Thought | Thought |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, out of the Ninth-month midnight, over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot, down from the shower’d halo, up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive, out from the patches of briers and blackberries, from the memories of the bird that chanted to me, from your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, from under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears, from those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist, from the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease, from the myriad thence-arous’d words, from the word stronger and more delicious than any, from such, as now they start, the scene revisiting, as a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing, borne hither—ere all eludes me, hurriedly, a man—yet by these tears a little boy again, throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, taking all hints to use them—but swiftly leaping beyond them, a reminiscence sing.
Effort |
Light your lamp and see the five windows in this image through which error enters your soul; as the prophet (Jeremiah) said, ‘Death comes in at the windows... through the eye it looks for strange things as with the other senses. So you must close these windows and open them only when necessary.
Effort | Experience | God | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Lord | Love | Men | Order | People | Praise | Study | God |
It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
Advertising | Art | Attention | Business | Effort | Judgment | Men | Nothing | Wants | World | Business | Art | Child |
No serious historian of politics would imagine that he had accounted for the protective tariff of the system of bounties or subsidies, for the monetary and banking laws, for the state of law in regard to corporate privileges and immunities, for the actual status of property rights, for agricultural or for labor policies, until he had gone behind the general claims and the abstract justifications and had identified the specifically interested groups which promoted the specific law.
The war for liberty never ends. One day liberty has to be defended against the power of wealth, on another day against the intrigues of politicians, on another against the dead hand of bureaucrats, on another against the patriot and the militarist, on another against the profiteer, and then against the hysteria and the passions of the mobs, against obscurantism and stupidity, against the criminal and against the over-righteous. In this campaign every civilized man is enlisted till he dies, and he only has known the full joy of living who somewhere and at some time has struck a decisive blow for the freedom of the human spirit.
Effort | Failure | Life | Life | Tragedy | Will | Failure | Loss |
Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.
Education | Effort | Experience | Important | Integration | Knowledge | Method | Right | Sense | Will |
The prophet lives in tension with the tradition. While the prophet is indeed shaped by the tradition, breaking free from the tradition to assert the new freedom of God is also characteristic of the prophet.
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.
Effort |