This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The meaning of life is experienced when we are in touch with our unique essence, sometimes called the divine spark within... It is both individual and universal. When we are fully aware of this unique inner radiance, we feel what it is to be utterly alive. We experience unconditional love. We sense complete safety because that spark also connects us to the universal divinity within all things.
Character | Divinity | Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Sense | Unique |
Sentiment and principle are often mistaken for each other, though, in fact, they widely differ. Sentiment is the virtue of ideas; principle the virtue of action. Sentiment has its seat in the had; principle, in the heart. Sentiment suggest fine harangues and subtle distinctions; principle conceives just notions, and performs good actions in consequence of them. Sentiment refines away the simplicity of truth, and the plainness of piety; and "gives us virtue in words, and vice in deeds."
Action | Character | Deeds | Good | Heart | Ideas | Piety | Sentiment | Simplicity | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Words | Vice |
Graceful, particularly in youth, is the tear of sympathy, and the heart that melts at the tale of woe; we should not permit ease and indulgence to contract our affections, and wrap us up in selfish enjoyment. But we should accustom ourselves to think of the distresses of human life, of the solitary cottage, the dying parent, and the weeping orphan. Nor ought we ever to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty.
Amusements | Character | Cruelty | Distress | Enjoyment | Heart | Indulgence | Life | Life | Pain | Sympathy | Woe | Youth | Think |
Robert Briffault, fully Robert Stephen Briffault
The full-grown modern human being who seeks but refuge finds instead boredom and mental dissolution, unless he can be, even in his withdrawal, creative. He can find the quality of happiness in the strain and travail only of achievement and growth. And he is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment which his life-urges demand when his is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.
Achievement | Character | Conquest | Fulfillment | Growth | Life | Life | Service | Happiness |
William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker
If you want to earn more - learn more. If you want to get more out of the world you must put more into the world. For, after all, men will get no more out of life than they put into it.
False modesty is the masterpiece of vanity: showing the vain man in such an illusory light that he appears in the reputation of the virtue quite opposite to the vice which constitutes his real character; it is a deceit.
Character | Deceit | Light | Man | Modesty | Reputation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
Give up the notion that there is a final state to attain. Spiritual life consists of ongoing practice undertaken as a lifetime work. This realization breeds humility, especially when we realize that in our initial infatuation with enlightenment, we underestimate the amount of inner work necessary to free us from our addictive patterns of thought and behavior.
Behavior | Character | Enlightenment | Humility | Life | Life | Practice | Thought | Work | Thought |
The goal of all education, preaching, and instruction is the development of mature individuals who will understand that difficulties in life are Divine-ordained challenges to overcome and opportunities for growth, and not excuses for defeat and self-ruination.
Character | Defeat | Education | Growth | Life | Life | Self | Will | Instruction | Understand |
Robert Bork, fully Robert Heron Bork
In the past few decades American institutions have struggled with the temptations of politics. Professions and academic disciplines that once possessed a life and structure of their own have steadily succumbed, in some cases almost entirely, to the belief that nothing matters beyond politically desirable results, however achieved.
Belief | Character | Life | Life | Nothing | Past | Politics |
Black Hawk, born Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak NULL
My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon and cultivate as far as necessary for their subsistence, and so long as they occupy and cultivate it they have the right to the soil, but if they voluntarily leave it then any other people have a right to settle on it. Nothing can be sold, except things that can be carried away.
Character | Children | Land | Nothing | People | Reason | Right | Spirit | Wisdom |