This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy.
Little | Understanding |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Your ‘personal’ life cannot have a lasting intrinsic meaning. It can acquire a contingent meaning, but only by being fitted into and subordinated to something which ‘lasts’ and has a meaning in itself. Is this something what we attempt to identify when we speak of ‘Life’? Can your life have a meaning as a tiny fragment of life? Does Life exist? Seek and you shall find, experience Life as reality. Has Life a ‘meaning’? Experience Life as reality and the question becomes meaningless. Seek - ? Seek by daring to take the leap into unconditional obedience. Dare this when you are challenged, for only by the light of a challenge will you be able to see the cross-roads and, in full awareness of your choice, turn your back upon your personal life - with no right ever to look back. You will find that ‘in the pattern’ you are liberated from the need to live ‘with the herd’. You will find that, thus subordinated, your life will receive from Life all its meaning, irrespective of the conditions given you for its realization. You will find that the freedom of the continual farewell, the hourly self-surrender, gives to your experience of reality the purity and clarity which signify - seal-realization. You will find that obedience requires an act of will which must continually be re-iterated, and that you will fail, if anything in your personal life is allowed to slip back into the center.
Awareness | Challenge | Choice | Daring | Experience | Freedom | Life | Life | Light | Meaning | Need | Obedience | Purity | Question | Reality | Receive | Right | Self | Surrender | Will | Awareness |
The road to knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through the self-knowledge we gain by pursuing the fleeting light in the depth of our being do we reach the point where we can grasp what faith is.
Faith | Knowledge | Light | Self | Self-knowledge |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
While still unable to do your duty to the living, how can you do your duty to the dead?... Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?
Death | Duty | Life | Life | Understanding | Understand |
You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
When I look at the stars and realize that the light from some of these suns takes a million years to reach my eyes, I realize how tiny and insignificant this earth is, and how microscopic and evanescent are my own little troubles. I will pass on soon; but the sea stretching for a thousand miles in all directions and the stars and spiral nebulae swarming through illimitable space above, they will continue for thousand of millions of years. I marvel that any man looking up at the stars can have an exaggerated opinion of his own importance.
Earth | Light | Little | Man | Opinion | Space | Troubles | Will |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
Do you know that if you are courteous and pleasant all day during your work that you will go home at night less fatigued than if you gave way to irritation? Pleasantry, light laughs, relieve tension. It isn't work that makes you tired, it's your mental attitude. Try it.
Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them.
Better | Life | Life | Man | Manners | Men | Solitude | Understanding | Will |
He who calls in the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; and he who profits by a superior understanding raises his powers to a level with the height of the superior understanding he unites with it.
Aid | Understanding |
Fortune reveals our virtues and vices, as light reveals material objects.
How many and deep are the divisions between human beings? Not only are there divisions between races, nations, classes and religions but also almost totally incomprehension between sexes, the old and young, the sick and healthy. There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
Nations | Society | Understanding | Society | Old |
The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
The flesh believes that pleasure is limitless and that it requires unlimited time; but the mind, understanding the end and limit of the flesh and ridding itself of fears of the future, secures a complete life and has no longer any need for unlimited time.
Future | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Pleasure | Time | Understanding |
Bashfulness is a great hindrance to a man, both in uttering his sentiments and in understanding what is proposed to him; it is therefore good to press forward with discretion, both in discourse and company of the better sort.
Better | Discretion | Good | Man | Understanding |