This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.
Children | Effort | Mind | Order | Sound | Time | Training | Truth |
Our children do not want models of perfection, neither do they want us to be buddies, friends, or confidants who never rise above their own levels of maturity and experience. We need to walk that middle ground between perfection and peerage, between intense meddling and apathy—the middle ground where our values, standards, and expectations can be shared with our children.
Children | Need | Perfection |
When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they were exercising their freedom of choice....Before eating the fruit, they did not know the difference between good and evil; thus they did not possess the knowledge which enables human beings to exercise freedom of choice. By eating the fruit, they acquired this knowledge; and from that moment onwards they were free. Thus the story of their banishment from Eden is in truth the story of how the human race gained its freedom...Adam and Eve became mature human beings, responsible to God for their actions....by defying God, Adam and Eve grew to maturity in his image.
Freedom | God | Good | Human race | Knowledge | Race | Story | Truth | God |
We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom.
Forgiveness | People | Forgiveness |
In the dimension of time, consciousness is experienced as the eternal present with a strong element of teleology: It is the future that pulls rather than the past that pushes. Some traditional views of man interpret the present as determined by the past. Specifically, these views hold that present events or problems are the workings out of early programing. Maturity then becomes the resolution of childhood conflicts.... An alternative interpretation of the situation is to seek ways to outgrow, i.e., genuinely overcome, a problem.... Genuine growth is the experience of being pulled or attracted by a goal in the future (Aristotle's final cause or telos), not that of being pushed into action (Aristotle's efficient cause or aitia). And in directing our gaze to the future, we utilize whatever material from the past we deem appropriate, including the use of the past to interfere with the future. Under this analysis, the past becomes almost irrelevant in the experience and conception of the present. Men like Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle and Bertrand Russell were able to maintain joy, growth, and vigor in old age because the future and not the past was experienced as determining their present.
Action | Age | Cause | Childhood | Consciousness | Eternal | Events | Experience | Future | Growth | Man | Old age | Past | Present | Problems | Resolution | Old |
I assume that each organism which the Creator educed was stamped with an indelible specific character, which made it what it was, and distinguished it from everything else, however near or like. I assume that such character has been, and is, indelible and immutable; that the characters which distinguish species now, were as definite at the first instant of their creation as now and are as distinct now as they were then. If any choose to maintain... that species were gradually bought to their present maturity from humbler forms... he is welcome to his hypothesis, but I have nothing to do with it.
Character | Distinguish | Nothing | Present |
With the maturity of his soul, a man desires to probe the depths of life, he desires to discover the power latent within him, he longs to know the sources and goal of his life, he yearns to understand the aim and meaning of his life, he wishes to understand the inner significance of things, and he wants to uncover all that is covered by name and form. He seeks insight into cause and effect, he wants to touch the mystery of time and space, and he wishes to find the missing link between God and man — where man ends, where God begins.
Cause | God | Insight | Man | Meaning | Mystery | Power | Time | Wants | Wishes | God | Understand |
THE PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE: The logic here is straightforward - - there are four stages in a product 's life cycle: introduction, growth,maturity,and decline, and the location of production depends on the stage of the cycle. Stage 1: Introduction - New products are introduced to meet local (i.e., national)needs, and new products are first exported to similar countries, i.e.,countries with similar needs,preferences,and incomes. If we also presume similar evolutionary patterns for all countries,then products are introduced in the most advanced nations. (e.g., the IBM PCs were produced in the US and spread quickly throughout the industrialized countries.) Stage 2: Growth - A copy product is produced elsewhere and introduced in the home country (and elsewhere) to capture growth in the home market. This moves production to other countries, usually on the basis of cost of production.(e.g.,the clones of the early IBM PCs were not produced in the U.S.)Stage 3: Maturity - The industry contracts and concentrates -- the lowest cost producer wins here. (E.g., the many clones of the PC are made almost entirely in lowest cost locations.)Stage 4: Decline - Poor countries constitute the only markets for the product. Therefore almost all declining products are produced in LDCs. (e.g., PCs are a very poor example here, mainly because there is weak demand for computers in LDCs. A better example is textiles.)
Better | Cost | Example | Growth | Industry | Life | Life | Logic |
I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but ourselves.
All love has a youth, a maturity and an old age. Was I already at that final stage when love no longer satisfied me unless accompanied each time by some new trick?
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Old |
He is very sorry that such undesirable things are every now and then cropping up in … and discouraging you in your work, keeping you from devoting all your spare time in teaching the Cause, and spreading its principles. He does not wish you, however, to lose heart from such things. As the Cause grows its difficulties will increase and its problems will become more numerous. The friends, especially the older ones, should therefore try and stand unmoved by them. In fact the more their difficulties will increase the more they have to take courage and try to solve them. The Master has often said that sorrows are like furrows, the deeper they go the more productive the land becomes. If this problem. .. should be settled other problems will arise. Are the friends to become discouraged or are they to follow the footsteps of the Master and consider them more as chances to show their tenacity of belief and spirit of sacrifice?
Belief | Books | Civilization | Destiny | Future | God | Human race | Humanity | Impetuosity | Infancy | Life | Life | Love | Past | Promise | Race | Time | Vehemence | Vision | Will | Wisdom | World | Youth | Youth | God | Old |
Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy . . . At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America.
There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force that really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.
The best way to learn geometry is to follow the road which the human race originally followed: Do things, make things, notice things, arrange things, and only then reason about things.
Children | Discussion | Need | Work |
We have accepted the watertight compartments of society, the fragmentation of living as factual and necessary. We live in relationship to these fragments and accept the internalized divisions—the various roles we play, the contradictory value systems, the opposing motives and priorities—as reality. We are at odds with ourselves internally; we believe that the inner is fundamentally different from the outer, that what is me is quite separate from the not-me, that divisions among people and nations are necessary, and yet we wonder why there are tensions, conflicts, wars in the world. The conflicts begin with minds that believe in fragmentation and are ignorant of wholeness.
Acceptance | Action | Awareness | Culture | Desire | Meaning | Passion | Peace | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Service | Society | Will | Society | Awareness |
Always stay on the path of seeing what is wrong, then you will see what is right.