This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
We are so involved in masks, and intensities, and inflations we can’t see the authentic in us. The primitive drives are Transcendental and you undergo a sacrifice by no longer identifying them as yours. Then, there’s a most amazing experience that takes place: your natural power comes through. When the ego surrenders wrapping itself around something, you realize you are imbued by something else, and have been all along, and your task is to find the simplicity mystery in relationship to that, so that when it is operating you recognize it is operating through you, but you don’t identify with it either consciously or unconsciously. You offer yourself as a Vehicle – it’s a mystery of relationship to the larger forces.
Consequences | Learning |
Today, with the scars of our past failures marring our existence and the fears of the future weighing heavily on our spirits, we can no longer go on with this dangerous game of fragmentation. We can no longer escape the fact that we are all bonded, equal in wholeness. Science and technology have brought each of us into intimate relationship with all others. We are truly a global human family. Yet as a family, we have not learned how to live together in peace, to live without violence and exploitation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell wrote: “Man knows how to fly in the air like a bird, he knows how to swim in water like the fish, but how to live among other human beings, he does not know.”
Acceptance | Consequences | Entertainment | Good | Habit | Inevitable | Injustice | Injustice | Little | Terror | Will |
There is no judge so searching as conscience conducting its own trial.
Action | Consequences |
All other tastes are bland and insipid; through them, the body and mind are rendered insipid as well.
Consequences | Ignorance | Men | World |
Stealing the wealth of others, coveting another man’s wife and doubting the integrity and character of friends - these three lead to one’s destruction.
Consequences | Kill | People | Wealth | Will |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.
Consequences | Desire | Dread | Liberty | Mind |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
Consequences | Men | Plenty | World |
Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen
The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
Birth | Body | Consequences | Culture | Deference | Distinction | Example | Force | Indulgence | Leisure | Lesson | Men | Office | Practice | Regard | Regulation | Respect | Speech | Respect | Vice |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
Consequences | Contemplation | Conversation | Decision | Deliberation | Dread | Enough | Glory | Illusion | Life | Life | Men | Past | Poverty | Practice | Reality | Deliberation | Contemplation | Think |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion.
Children | Consequences | Equality | Men | Opportunity |
Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
Consequences | Leisure | Life | Life |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
Ideas are malleable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse---and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it, until the last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.
Consequences | Evolution | Martyrs | Responsibility | Society | Society |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
I'm looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Consequences | Evolution | Martyrs | Responsibility | Society | Society |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.
Choice | Consequences | Freedom | Responsibility | Surrender | Time | Will | Learn |
Without independence men cannot become either wise, useful, or happy.
Consequences | Government | Thinking | Government | Trouble |
The through-and-through universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.
Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL
A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first.
Consequences | Good | Hell | Man |
If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings.
Action | Consequences | Desire | Earnestness | Fulfillment | Individual | Life | Life | Mankind | Opinion | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Struggle |
I became one of those annoying people who always say Ciao! Only I was extra annoying, since I would always explain where the word ciao comes from. (If you must know, it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval Venetians as an intimate salutation: Sono il suo schiavo! Meaning: I am your slave!) Just speaking these words made me feel sexy and happy. My divorce lawyer told me not to worry; she said she had one client (Korean by heritage) who, after a yucky divorce, legally changed her name to something Italian, just to feel sexy and happy again.
Balance | Behavior | Consequences | Depression | Ends | Family | Grief | Need | Panic | People | Will |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
It is... in the hour of his first success, that the most subtle temptation comes to the artist, to let the genius that created his public be directed by that public. Once he has won them, they always keep asking for the identical pleasure they experienced the first time. So the painter sells himself to the dealer who is certain he can place any number of copies of the same work with his customers... The novelist rewrites the same novel. The musician repeats the same songs. The artist... becomes his own disciple and calls upon his talent to exploit the creations of his genius.