This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Many people not only lose the benefit, but are even the worse for their mortifications [i.e., sacrifices, abstentions]... because they mistake the whole nature and worth of them: they practice them for their own sakes, as things good in themselves, they think them to be real parts of holiness, and so rest in them and look no further, but grow full of a self-esteem and self-admiration for their own progress in them. This makes them self-sufficient, morose, severe judges of all those that fall short of their mortifications. And thus their self-denials do only that for them which indulgences do for other people: they withstand and hinder the operation of God upon their souls, and instead of being really self-denials, they strengthen and keep up the kingdom of self.
Wisdom |
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
Belief | Courage | Eternal | Light | Means | Nature | Need | Trust | Wisdom | World |
If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.
Action | Experience | Poetry | Thought | Thought |
The opposition between the men who have and the men who are is immemorial.
The sin of Science is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, the tendency to renovate its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors.
Experience | Mystical | Sense |
Join hope to our hope and blend sorrow with sorrow,And seek for men's love in the short days of life.
Experience | Important | Words | Understand |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
You know,' he said, sitting back, reflectively, 'it's at times like this that you kind of wonder if it's worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that's been bugging me.
Experience | Learning |
Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying.
However great the advantages which nature bestows on us, it is not she alone, but fortune in conjunction with her, which makes heroes.
It requires greater virtues to support good than bad fortune.
Doubt | Experience | Journey | Life | Life |
Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL
Should you desire great tranquility, prepare to sweat white beads.
We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.
Age | Experience | Knowledge | Memory |
Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
These, characteristically different from one another and variously modified by the gunas, present to the intellect (buddhi) the whole purpose of the Self (purusha), illumining it like a lamp.
Experience | Nature | Pain | Self | Suffering |
Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL
We should practice wisdom during our daily work, during interacting with annoying people, performing tiresome duties, looking after parents or sick relatives, ... if someone neglects these duties, but excels in his study of Zen, he is vastly off the mark.
Doubt | Experience | Will |
When asked about the importance of receiving teachings on dedication, Gape Lama answered, "Whatever Dharma practice we engage in, large or small, we must dedicate the merit. If we fail to dedicate, then whatever merit we have accumulated can be lost very easily in a moment of anger, or in giving rise to any afflictive emotion or action."