This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Real love is when you are constantly watching the progress of the soul. As soon as you cater to someone’s physical desires and bad habits you are not loving that soul anymore. You are just pleasing that person to avoid ill will. No matter how unpleasant it is to tell a friend that he is wrong, if you say it with love in your heart and stand firm on it, sometimes that person will respect you if you are right. If you are wrong, even then he will know that you did it with sincerity, out of love.
Friend | Heart | Love | Progress | Respect | Soul | Will | Respect |
Plan your progress carefully; hour-by hour, day-by-day, month-by-month. Organized activity and maintained enthusiasm are the wellsprings of your power.
Enthusiasm | Progress |
If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.
That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems.
Paul Samuelson, fully Paul Anthony Samuelson
Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
What is more important than the meal? Doesn’t the least observant man-about-town look upon the implementation and ritual progress of a meal as a liturgical prescription? Isn’t all of civilization apparent in these careful preparations, which consecrate the spirit’s triumph over a raging appetite?
Civilization | Important | Progress |
Some benefit has not failed to flow from the imperfect attempts which have been made to erect a system of equal rights to property and power upon the basis of arbitrary institutions. They have undoubtedly, in every case, from the instability of their foundation, failed. Still, they constitute a record of those epochs at which a trite sense of justice suggested itself to the understandings of men, so that they consented to forego all the cherished delights of luxury, all the habitual gratifications arising out of the possession or the expectation of power, all the superstitions with which the accumulated authority of ages had made them dear and venerable. They are so many trophies erected in the enemy's land, to mark the limits of the victorious progress of truth and justice.
Authority | Expectation | Instability | Justice | Power | Progress | Property | Rights | Sense | System | Truth | Expectation |
In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics.
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know. But we already know much! What if that knowledge — and only that — should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed?
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
All that was an element of progress in the past or an instrument of moral and intellectual improvement of the human race is due to the practice of mutual aid, to the customs that recognized the equality of men and brought them to ally, to unite, to associate for the purpose of producing and consuming, to unite for purpose of defense to federate and to recognize no other judges in fighting out their differences than the arbitrators they took from their own midst.
Defense | Equality | Fighting | Human race | Improvement | Men | Past | Practice | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Race |
The variety of life in nature can be compared to a vast library of unread books, and the plundering of nature is comparable to the random discarding of whole volumes without having opened them, and learned from them. Our critical dependence on the great variety of nature for the progress we have already made has been amply documented. Indifference to the loss of species is, in effect, indifference to the future, and therefore a shameful carelessness about our children.
Dependence | Indifference | Life | Life | Nature | Progress | Loss |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.
Belief | Capitalism | Creed | Equality | Freedom | Individual | Order | Progress | Society | Society |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward" — of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbors, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And man is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.
Evil | Evolution | Giving | Good | Guarantee | Man | Morality | Oneness | Perception | Practice | Present | Progress | Receive | Revenge | Struggle |
Petronius, fully Gaius Petronius Arbiter Gasus , aka Petronius Arbiter NULL
We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.[validity of quote disputed]
Beginning | Illusion | Life | Life | Method | Progress | Time | Learn |
Human Energy presents itself to our view as the term of a vast process in which the whole mass of the universe is involved. In us, the evolution of the world towards the spirit becomes conscious. From that moment, our perfection, our interest, our salvation as elements of creation can only be to press on with this evolution with all our strength. We cannot yet understand exactly where it will lead us, but it would be absurd for us to doubt that it will lead us towards some end of supreme value. From this there finally emerges in our twentieth century human consciousness, for the first time since the awakening of life on earth, the fundamental problem of Action. No longer, as in the past, for our small selves, for our small family, our small country; but for the salvation and the success of the universe, how must we, modern men, organize around us for the best, the maintenance, distribution and progress of human energy?
Absurd | Awakening | Doubt | Energy | Evolution | Life | Life | Progress | Salvation | Spirit | Success | Time | Universe | Will | World | Understand |
Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
That which distinguishes him from the figurative artist is the fact that in his creations he frees himself from individual sentiments and from particular impressions which he receives from outside, and that he breaks loose from the domination of the individual inclination within him. It is therefore equally wrong to think that the non-figurative artist creates through ‘the pure intention of his mechanical process,’ that he makes ‘calculated abstractions,’ and that he wishes to ’suppress sentiment not only in himself but also in the spectator.’ It is a mistake to think that he retires completely into his system. That which is regarded as a system is nothing but constant obedience to the laws of pure plastics, to necessity, which art demands from him. It is thus clear that he has not become a mechanic, but that the progress of science, of technique, of machinery, of life as a whole, has only made him into a living machine, capable of realizing in a pure manner the essence of art. In this way, he is in his creation sufficiently neutral, that nothing of himself or outside of him can prevent him from establishing that which is universal. Certainly his art is art for art’s sake … for the sake of the art which is form and content at one and the same time.
Art | Inclination | Individual | Intention | Life | Life | Mistake | Nothing | Obedience | Progress | Sentiment | System | Wishes | Wrong | Art | Think |
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
The secret of seeking the will of God lies in cultivating the faculty of sensing harmony; for harmony is beauty and beauty is harmony, and the lover of beauty in his further progress becomes the seeker of harmony; and by trying always to maintain harmony, man will tune his heart to the will of God.
Beauty | God | Harmony | Heart | Man | Progress | Will | Beauty | God |
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
How can one explain spiritual progress? What is it? What is it like? Spiritual progress is the changing of the point of view.
Progress |