This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Uplift your inner nature and you will uplift your love-life.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The last thing on earth which should bother you is the sudden failure of your carefully laid plans. Do not take your plans as being you and the disruption of any plan will be as nothing to you. Your plans are not you; they only appear to be so because of that human mistake called identification.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
A weakness natural to superior and to little men, when they have committed a fault, is to wish to make it pass as a work of genius, a vast combination which the vulgar cannot comprehend. Pride says these things and folly credits them.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
We must become acquainted with our emotional household: we must see our feelings as they actually are, not as we assume they are. This breaks their hypnotic and damaging hold on us.
Behavior | Friend | Life | Life | Present | Thinking | Leadership | Learn |
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself.
Ceremony | Character | Death | Impression | Nations | Reason | Respect | Sacred | Respect |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
Behavior | Decision | Dignity | Freedom | Life | Life | Man | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Behavior | Freedom | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
Beginning | Behavior | Instinct | Man | People | Tradition | Wishes | Loss |
I cannot make decisions about things it is not proper for him to decide. He is merely putting in a good word for genuine peace, and for achieving it quickly.
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
Behavior | Citizenship | Will |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
The need poisons the evils it cannot heal.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Fools do not understand men of intelligence.
Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming
Pull one hair and the whole body is affected.