This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease, and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord; and the supreme arts of temperance, of justice, and of wisdom, as they are acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose utter name is, by their award, simpleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know.
Disease | Evil | Good | Harmony | Health | Ignorance | Innocence | Judgment | Justice | Men | Music | Wisdom |
The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he form whom meanness withholds some important benefit.
Important | Man | Meanness | Selfishness |
Spiritual teachers emphasize that by abandoning our preconceived ideas and ordinary perceptual filters, we can experience high states of consciousness, inexpressible delight, and a sense of innocence and mystery about existence... the transfiguration of life from a vale of tears into a celebration of truth and beauty.
Beauty | Consciousness | Existence | Experience | Ideas | Innocence | Life | Life | Mystery | Sense | Tears | Truth |
B. C. Forbes, fully Bertie Charles "B.C." Forbes
The human being who lives only for themselves finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies. Don't put off the joy derivable from doing helpful, kindly things for others.
Joy | Nothing | Selfishness | Unhappiness |
Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.
Love | Selfishness | Survival | Virtue | Virtue |
The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest.
Action | Impulse | Selfishness |
Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke — that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.
Earth | Good | Heaven | Innocence | Life | Life | Object | Praise | Universe |
There are only two great economic systems in operation in the world today. If Capitalism in the spirit of Christian love can solve the problem of distribution and bring unemployment to an end, it will find itself spreading and recapturing the nations it has lost to its rival. But if Capitalism is permeated with selfishness it will gradually give way to Communism, Technocracy or some other form of Socialism.
Capitalism | Love | Nations | Selfishness | Spirit | Will | World |
The greatest comforts and lasting peace are obtained when one eradicates selfishness from within.
Peace | Selfishness |
Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect, and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.
The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door.
To be lonely, that is to feel oneself isolated, having no relationship with anything; in that sense of loneliness there is despair - there are moods, one is familiar with that sense of loneliness - and one runs away from it by turning on the radio, by reading a book, by sex and ten different activities. That loneliness is the very essence of self-consciousness. And when one goes beyond that, there is this state of attention in which there is complete aloneness, which is not isolation, which is not separation, which is not a withdrawal. Because it is only this aloneness, when the mind is no longer a plaything of thought, when thought has been understood totally - then out of that comes this sense of aloneness. it is that which is innocence, and it is that innocence which is beyond all mortality.
Attention | Despair | Innocence | Loneliness | Mind | Reading | Relationship | Sense | Thought | Thought |
There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.
Politics | Selfishness |
The only way to be loved is to be and to appear lovely; to possess and display kindness, benevolence, tenderness; to be free from selfishness and to be alive to the welfare of others.
Display | Selfishness |
John D. Rockefeller, fully John Davidson Rockefeller I
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.
Duty | Greatness | Mankind | Sacrifice | Selfishness | Service | Soul |
Civilized man has been more ruthlessly wasteful and grasping in his attitude toward the natural world than has served even his most material best interests. Possibly - as some hope - a mere enlightened selfishness will save it in time. Even if we should learn just in the nick of time not to destroy what is necessary for our own preservation, the mere determination to survive is not sufficient to save very much of the variety and beauty of the natural world. They can e preserved only if man feels the necessity of sharing the earth with at least some of his fellow creatures to be a privilege rather han an irritation. And he is not likely to feel that without something more than intellectual curiosity - that something more you may call love, fellow-feeling, or reverence for life. Without reverence or love the increasing awareness of what the science of ecology teaches us can come to be no more than a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share in.
Awareness | Beauty | Better | Curiosity | Destroy | Determination | Earth | Hope | Love | Man | Necessity | Reverence | Science | Selfishness | Time | Will | World | Beauty | Awareness | Learn | Privilege |