This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love is a very complex emotion, requiring a richness of personality and a great variety of talents.. It develops also into the abstract feeling for things or ideas, for beauty and learning, and, finally, into a feeling for the Supreme Being.
Abstract | Beauty | Ideas | Learning | Love | Personality | Beauty |
Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature -if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature- consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich
Philosophy is the continuing search for life’s meaning.
Life | Life | Meaning | Philosophy | Search |
No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.
The whole of man’s life on the face of Earth can be summed up by that search for his Soul Mate. He may pretend to be running after wisdom, money, or power, but none of that matter. Whatever he achieves will be incomplete if he fails to find his Soul Mate.
Earth | Life | Life | Man | Money | Power | Search | Soul | Will | Wisdom |
You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.
Experience | Search |
Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.
Appearance | Cause | Growth | Unity |
Let me consider this as a resolution by which I pledge myself to act in all variety of circumstances and to which I must recur often in times of carelessness and temptation – to measure my conduct by the rule of conscience.
Circumstances | Conduct | Conscience | Resolution | Rule | Temptation | Temptation |
Most learning consists of extended plateau periods in which we solidify progress through repetitive activity, followed by little spurts of improvement... With repeated practice, we give up our restless search for happiness in the next moment and learn that by inhabiting each moment with full awareness, we experience a deepening sensory aliveness and richness.
Aliveness | Awareness | Experience | Improvement | Learning | Little | Practice | Progress | Search | Happiness | Learn |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
To each individual in the world will take on a different connotation of meaning - the importance lies in the desire to search for an answer.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.
Culture |
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and in passivity, assertion and denial. To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment, there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.
Appearance | Assertion | Enlightenment | Ignorance | Meaning | Nothing | Reality | Search | Talking | Thinking | Truth | Will | World | Think |