This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Solitude is important to man. It is necessary to his achievement of peace and contentment. It is a well into which he dips for refreshment for his soul. It is his laboratory in which he distills the pure essence of worth from the raw materials of his experiences. It is his refuge when the very foundations of his life are being shaken by disastrous events.
Achievement | Contentment | Events | Important | Life | Life | Man | Peace | Solitude | Soul | Wisdom | Worth |
The total achievement of science hitherto is but a recognition of a small fraction of the creative thoughts by which the world is made.
Achievement | Science | Wisdom | World |
A goal-oriented life locates the purposed of life in the achievement of a goal, which is necessarily tied to a discrete moment in time… But we also exist across time, and when our life’s goals are fixed so narrowly on moments that are only briefly the present, we fail to do justice to the enduring aspect of human life… Moments slip away and so if life’s purpose is tied to moments. Although moments can play a part, in order to find a purpose which is truly fulfilling, we also need to find a way of living which is worthwhile in itself. Life is rarely an undiluted pleasure that our own attitudes are themselves important to our sense of well-being.
Achievement | Goals | Important | Justice | Life | Life | Need | Order | Play | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Time |
I feel that art has something to do with achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm… an arrest of attention in the mist of distraction.
Achievement | Art | Attention | Prayer |
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
If we see life’s purpose as the achievement of future goals, several problems arise. If we are mortal, the problem is simply that there will come a time when we have no future. Life would end with meaning unfulfilled, since death would eventually rob us of the future where the purposes for our actions lie.
Achievement | Death | Future | Goals | Life | Life | Meaning | Mortal | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Will |
Good work is never done in cold blood; heat is required to forge anything. Every great achievement is the story of a flaming heart.
Achievement | Good | Heart | Story | Work |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
The achievement of meaning in life is akin to the gaining of knowledge: neither can be simply handed on; we all must gain each for ourselves
Achievement | Knowledge | Life | Life | Meaning |
César Chávez, fully César Estrada Chávez
The end of all education should surely be service to others. We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about the progress and prosperity of our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others for their sake and for our own.
Achievement | Education | Enough | Progress | Prosperity | Service |
There is not even one single thing we value when we restrict the question to ethical values. Instead, there is a plurality of different things we value, but in ethics and in life in general. In life we value pleasure, human interaction, achievement and contact with reality. In ethics we value human flourishing but also commitment and justice per se… No single set of rules seems adequate to the irreducible plurality of incommensurable things that we value.
Achievement | Commitment | Ethics | Justice | Life | Life | Pleasure | Question | Reality | Value |
We must distinguish between being human and human being. We are born human beings. What we must acquire is being human. Being human is the essential – the decisive – achievement of a human being.
The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power.
Achievement | Attention | Circumstances | Destroy | Genius | Little | Mediocrity | Men | Nature | Power | Prison | Sense |