This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Perfectionists and zealots can break but not bend; in my experience they are subject to burnout from diminishing returns or else, to borrow Santayana's definition of the fanatic, they redouble their efforts just when they have lost sight of their ends.
Ends | Experience |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Ambition | Character | Experience | Quiet | Soul | Success | Suffering | Vision | Ambition | Trial |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.
Experience | Joy |
Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
Believe in yourself. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face. You must do that which you think you cannot do.
Confidence | Courage | Experience | Fear | Strength | Think |
Philosophy may help to cleanse our thinking, but only in experience itself, in stumbling through life and reflecting about our moments of joy and despair, can we learn how to live.
Despair | Experience | Joy | Life | Life | Philosophy | Thinking | Learn |
To get profit without risk, experience without danger, and reward without work, is as impossible as it is to live without being born.
Danger | Experience | Reward | Risk | Work |
Every moment of fulfillment or consummation symbolically defeats the idea of death. It is as if our experience proclaimed to the world: "Though I will die, at least I have achieved this much." Through deeds that are humane, artistic, or merely nurturing, the imagination propels us into a time when we will no longer be, but whatever we care about will survive and possibly prevail. We know we will die, but we deploy our energies toward possible occurrences that project themselves through life as if it continues in the future.
Care | Death | Deeds | Experience | Fulfillment | Future | Imagination | Life | Life | Time | Will | World | Deeds |
The ultimate dread occurs when we confront nothing. In the face of nothing, no thing and no being can help us; it is at that moment when we experience existential isolation in its fullness.
Dread | Experience | Isolation | Nothing |
The human race has had long experience and a find tradition in surviving adversity. But now we face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.
Adversity | Experience | Human race | Little | Prosperity | Race | Tradition |
If we want to see how we got to be where we are in life, we need only to trace our experience back to our thoughts.
Experience | Life | Life | Need |
We too often mistake the form of an experience for its essence. We worship the physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and not the Spirit itself.
Experience | Mistake | Spirit | Worship |
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.