This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
Wisdom |
One need remain in hell no longer than he chooses to; and the moment he chooses not to remain longer, not all the powers in the universe can prevent his leaving it. One can rise to any heaven he himself chooses; and when he chooses so to rise, all the higher powers of the universe combine to help him heavenward.
From the perspective of the minuteness of our planet in relationship with the entire universe a person’s seeking honor is ridiculous.
Character | Honor | Relationship | Universe |
I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean of the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man - a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.
Character | Joy | Light | Man | Mind | Sense | Spirit | Thinking | Thought |
The general conclusion is that all the objects of science, including minds and goods, are things occurring in space and time... and that we can study them in virtue of the fact that we come into spatial and temporal relations with them. And therefore all ideals, ultimates, symbols, agencies and the like are to be rejected, and no such distinction as that of facts and principles, or facts and values, can be maintained. There are only facts, i.e., occurrences in space and time.
Distinction | Ideals | Principles | Science | Space | Study | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
Relationship as a path leads us on a journey of the heart - which involves becoming more fully human, more available to life as a whole. Intimate relationships are ideally suited as this kind of path because they inspire our heart to open, while at the same time showing us where we are most stuck.
Character | Heart | Journey | Life | Life | Relationship | Time |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Simplicity is the glory of expression. The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual.
Character | Glory | Simplicity | Universe |
Strange and hard that paradox true I give, objects gross and the unseen soul are one.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
All the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
Any living thing which triumphs in the struggle against its environment destroys itself.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
The tools of the mind become burdens when the environment which made them necessary no longer exists.
Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
Every human soul is of infinite value, eternal, free; no human being, therefore, is so places as not to have within his reach, in himself and others, objects adequate to infinite endeavor.
Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
We live in an environment whose principal product is garbage. The shined shoe in such a society is a hypocritical statement because it promotes the lie that we can thrive on garbage without being dirtied by it.
A complete moral philosophy would tell us how and why we should act and feel towards others in relationships of shifting and varying power asymmetry and shifting and varying intimacy.
Philosophy | Power | Wisdom |
Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett
You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.