This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Young love-making - that gossamer web!... The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.
Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active, and elaborate technique of inquiry... Pure reasoning as a means of arriving at truth is like the spider who spins a web out of himself. The web is orderly and elaborate, but is s only a trap.
How mysterious in this human life, with all its diversities of contrast and compensation; this web of checkered destinies,; this sphere of manifold allotment, where man lives in his greatness and grossness, a little lower than the angels, a little higher than the brutes.
Angels | Character | Compensation | Contrast | Greatness | Life | Life | Little | Man |
Quantum physics teaches us that nothing exists in isolation. All of matter, from subatomic particles to galaxies, is part of an intricate web of relationship within a unified whole.
Isolation | Nothing | Relationship | Wisdom |
The mind could never mar one iota of Truth. The Truth is eternal, and it is not in any way assailable. Our perception of Truth is, however, vulnerable, and it is too easily distorted by the web of ignorance, spun by the crafty spider of the rational mind. In order to know the Truth, we must learn to recognize a Source other than facts.
Eternal | Ignorance | Mind | Order | Perception | Truth | Learn |
Chief Seattle, also spelled Seathl
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle, also spelled Seathl
All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand on it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Seattle, also spelled Seathl
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "basic building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way.
Nature |
Quantum theory has abolished the notion of fundamentally separated objects... It has come to see the universe as an interconnected web of physical and mental relations whose parts are only defined through their connections to the whole.
Universe |
The core prescription for happiness and meaning handed down through all the world’s spiritual teaching is unchanging: Remember the source with gratitude, and love one another. In this way the meaning of life as an interconnected web of love and compassion becomes manifest in even the most seemingly mundane moments.
Compassion | Gratitude | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | World | Happiness |
A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father, but it can be known only as love.
Father | God | Illusion | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Mystery | Spirit |
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
Capacity | Individual | Rest |
Chief Seattle, also spelled Seathl
This we know. The earth does not belong to man: man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
The Eastern mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves and grows and changes continually. Modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a web of relations and, like Eastern mysticism, has recognised that this web is intrinsically dynamic. The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave-nature of subatomic particles, and is even more essential in relativity theory, where the unification of space and time implies that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of subatomic particles can therefore only be understood in a dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation.