This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
Imagination | Words |
How sour sweet music is, when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives, and here have I the daintiness of ear to check time broke in a disordered string; but for the concord of my state and time had not an ear to hear my true time broke. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; for now hath Time made me his numbering clock. My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, whereto my finger, like a dial's point, is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart, which is the bell. Richard II, Act v, Scene 5
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
They only employ words to disguise their thoughts.
Many people consider the happiest days in their lives when they received the applause and acclaim of others. But the fact they needed someone else’s approval for their happiness makes them dependent on others. Someone who can find happiness even when he is insulted is assured of having a happy life. Once a person knows that he is able to experience positive feelings even when insulted, he is free from the fear of what people might say to him. This can give a persona feeling of liberation. If you believe someone else’s words cannot hurt you, they won’t.
Applause | Experience | Fear | Feelings | Happy | Life | Life | People | Words | Approval | Happiness |
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Awareness | Belief | Experience | Individual | Language | People | Reality | Sense | Tradition | Words | Awareness | Victim |
The actual technique of prayer - the kneeling, the hiding of the face in the hands, the uttering of words in an audible voice, the words being addressed into empty space - helps by its mere dissimilarity from ordinary actions of everyday life to put one into a devout frame of mind.
Dr. Seuss, pen name for Theodore Seuss Geisel
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.
Words |
Dmitri Shostakovich, fully Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich
There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes. Only Beethoven was a forerunner of the revolutionary movement. If you read his letters, you will see how often he wrote to his friends that he wished to give new ideas to the public and rouse it to revolt against its masters.
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.
Appreciation | Giving | Power | Tomorrow | Will | Words | World | Appreciation | Happiness |
Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL
No words can describe it, no example can point to it. Samsara does not make it worse, Nirvana does not make it better. It has never been born, it has never ceased. It has never been liberated, it has never been deluded. It has never existed, it has never been non existent. It has no limits at all. It does not fall into any kind of category.
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Human reason exhausts itself ceaselessly to explain the inexplicable. Explanation itself is high comedy, as preposterous as trying to see the back of one's own head, but the vanity of the ego is boundless, and it becomes even more overblown by this very attempt to make sense of nonsense. The mind, in its identity with the ego, cannot by definition, comprehend reality; if it could, it would instantly dissolve itself upon recognizing its own illusory nature. It's only beyond the paradox of mind transcending ego that what IS stands forth, self-evident and dazzling in its infinite Absoluteness. And then all of these words are useless.
Comedy | Ego | Mind | Nature | Nonsense | Paradox | Reality | Reason | Self | Sense | Words |
Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon
Immodest words admit no defence, for want of decency is want of sense.
It is written: "Forever, O G‑d, Your word stands firm in the heavens" (Psalms 119:89). Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, of blessed memory, explained the verse thus: Your word which you uttered, "Let there be a firmament..." (Genesis 1:6), these very words and letters stand firmly forever within the firmament of heaven and are forever clothed within the heavens to give them life and existence... And so it is with all created things, down to the most corporeal and inanimate of substances. If the letters of the "ten utterances" by which the world was created during the six days of creation were to depart from it for but an instant, G‑d forbid, it would revert to absolute nothingness.
Life is inherent in cosmic forces, and as we live and think, so the Universe responds to us. This is prayer, with our life fields or auras carrying an electrical charge to attract negative ions to us and be more stimulated. In this way our life fields remain positively charged and attract the negative particles or ions. This is the secret of life. Retaining communication and unity with the Universe ... our Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy … which is energy in harmonic interaction with neighboring galaxies and galaxies beyond into inter-galactic space … ad infinitum … where wave patterns create harmonic chords that can be read like a score of music … and the illusion of matter strung together with electromagnetic and nuclear forces of light.
Energy | Illusion | Life | Life | Music | Space | Unity | Universe |