This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.
There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost.
Order |
Truth telling is not compatible with the defense of the realm.
A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
Religion [cannot] maintain itself apart from thought, but either advances to the comprehension of the idea, or, compelled by thought itself, becomes intensive belief - or lastly, from despair of finding itself at home in thought, flees back from it in pious horror, and becomes superstition.
Belief | Despair | Pious | Religion | Superstition | Thought | Thought |
The severest punishment suffered by a sensitive mind, for injury inflicted upon another, is the consciousness of having done it.
Consciousness | Mind | Punishment |
Keep the home near heaven. Let it face toward the Father’s house. Not only let the day begin and end with God, with mercies acknowledged and forgiveness sought, but let it be seen and felt that God is your chiefest joy, His will in all you do the absolute and sufficient reason.
Absolute | Day | Father | Forgiveness | God | Heaven | Joy | Reason | Will | Forgiveness | God |
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.
Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters... The mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.
Choice | Circumstances | Conduct | Conformity | Eccentricity | Feelings | Growth | Mind | Nature | Peculiarity | People | Pleasure | Taste | Thought | Wishes | Following | Thought |
Our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the outer world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one’s own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one’s own mind and body.
Body | Capacity | Comfort | Familiarity | God | Mind | Understanding | Will | World |
The worst is yet to come, however. Far more devastating that this pruning is that nature then brings about a corresponding increase of the connecting links of the emotional circuits in this cyngulate gyrus with the lower survival fight-or-flight structures of the amygdala, that neural module linked directly with our ancient defense and survival system in the reptilian brain. In this way, a sharp curtailment of connections with the higher, transcendent frequencies of mind and heart is brought about in order to shift growth toward the lower, protective survival systems.
Defense | Growth | Heart | Mind | Nature | Order | Survival | System |
An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
Insult |
What is slander? A verdict of “guilty” pronounced in the absence of the accused, with closed doors, without defense or appeal, by an interested and prejudiced judge.
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
Fear | Justify | Men | Speech | Suppression |
The home is the empire! There is no peace more delightful than one's own fireplace.
Peace |