This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The biological origins of awareness... Contact, communication and recognition all take place at a very simple level - occurring even amongst social bacteria that seem to be able to recognise self from non-self.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
There is no happiness without security- I mean the prospect of being able to rely on the permanence of a state into which one has settled oneself. This assurance is to be found either in the mastering of things, or in the mastering of self which makes one independent of things.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is not more than the soul, and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, and whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, and I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, and to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, and there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, and there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe, and I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, for I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is sign'd by God's name, and I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.
Better | Body | God | Learning | Man | Men | Nothing | Object | Peace | Self | Soul | Sympathy | Will | Wisdom | Following | God | Understand |
I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.
René Bazin, fully René François Nicolas Marie Bazin
There is no need to go searching for a remedy for the evils of the time. The remedy already exists - it is the gift of one’s self to those who have fallen so low that even hope fails them. Open wide your heart.
Bayazid Bastami, also known as Abu-Yazid Al-Bistami or Tayfur Abu Yazid al-Bustami
Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God.
Forgetfulness | God | Self |
Benjamin Cardozo, fully Benjamin Nathan Cardozo
The submergence of self in the pursuit of an ideal, the readiness to spend oneself without measure, prodigally, almost ecstatically, for something intuitively apprehended as great and noble, spend oneself one know not why - some of us like to believe that this is what religion means.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.
Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |
Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
Self |
A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self [ego]. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.
Beauty | Compassion | Consciousness | Delusion | Ego | Experience | Feelings | Humanity | Nature | Prison | Rest | Self | Sense | Space | Thinking | Time | Universe | Value |
By one’s self the evil is done, by one’s self one suffers; by one’s self evil is left undone, by one’s self one is purified. The pure and the impure stand and fall by themselves, no one can purify another.
Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré
To face God and eternal life aright, each person must accept reality. Flight from God is the flight of fear. Acceptance of God is the acceptance of the love that involves the acceptance of self and others. It is the acceptance of life.
Acceptance | Eternal | Fear | God | Life | Life | Love | Reality | Self | God |
If I am part of God, if the Self at its core is God, then I cannot deny Him, nor He deny me, and there is no relationship, for He is constrained by His being as I, and He is not the only necessary being, for I am necessary too, and He exists by my will as much as I do by His.
God | Relationship | Self | Will |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns.
Authority | Effort | Individual | Self | Submission |
In our loss of the perception of the Void and our conviction that particular things are finally real, we come to believe in the separate, isolated reality of some enduring self within us for which we a plan and hope great things. Alas, we are frustrated in our hoping because all through our lives our hopes are incompletely attained or, if fulfilled, strangely unsatisfying after all.