This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Al-Shafi’I, fully Abū ʿAbdullāh Muhammad ibn Idrīs al-Shafiʿī NULL
Never do I argue with a; man with a desire to hear him say what is wrong, or to expose him and win a victory over him… Whenever I face an opponent in debate I silently pray, “O Lord, Help him so that truth may flow from his heart and on his tongue, and so that if truth is on my side, he may follow me; and if it be on his side, I may follow him.”
Let’s imagine a visual image of your “life” as an energetic field. This energetic field attracts to you people, opportunities, and events. Within that field is a central point of purpose around which incoming energy is organized. Affecting and modifying that central point of purpose are energetic sub-fields of beliefs, attitudes, past experiences, expectations, unresolved emotional states, and other unconscious material. At all times, we emit a certain energy pattern based on our physical, emotional and spiritual states. The model of a magnetic force field is intended to suggest that we not only radiate our energy from a centralized self-organizing, indwelling purpose, but that energetic field also attracts in, or magnetizes to itself, those people and things that will help fulfill that purpose.
Energy | Events | Force | Life | Life | Model | Past | People | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Will |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
Just as life is defined as biological change and death as its lack, so meaning in life is characterized by the application of stable patterns to changing circumstances and the replacing of old patterns of understanding with new and exploratory ones. Meaning is found in the losing of it, the searching after it, and in the finding of it again. The meaning in your life is in flux and is to be found in the flux (the flow) of meaning, which is therefore itself a source of meaning in your life. All this does require, however, the developing of a tolerance for ambiguity, of a willingness to accept the inevitability of change and the precariousness of your present vision, and of an openness to the unending richness of your experience of the world in its manifold variety and diversity.
Ambiguity | Change | Circumstances | Death | Diversity | Experience | Life | Life | Meaning | Openness | Present | Understanding | Vision | World | Old |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
The meaning of life is to be found in the living of it, and even for the individual a considerable range of possibilities and an unending flow of reflections upon your life constitutes part of that meaning. Play has no ultimate goal, no serious goal that will bring it to an end, but rather renews itself in constant repetition, with no repetition being an exact repeat of a prior instance. Living has a series of goals and is serious as well as playful, and yet the goals are always in transformation, or at least always in doubt. Circumstances are often similar, but it is not easy to specify exactness in your lived experience, even with someone with whom you have lived most of your life.
Circumstances | Doubt | Experience | Goals | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Will |
George Burns, born Nathan Birnbaum
If you were to go around asking people what would make them happier, you’d get answers like “a new car,” a bigger house,” “a raise in pay,” or “winning the lottery.” Probably not one in a hundred would say “a chance to help people,” and yet that is what brings about the most happiness of all.
Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
R. E. C. Browne, fully Robert Eric Charles Browne
Medieval churchmen… held that faith, hope and love are the fundamental Christian virtues and that the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude) are needed to express faith, hope and love in all the varying circumstances of life in the world.
Circumstances | Faith | Fortitude | Hope | Justice | Life | Life | Love | Prudence | Prudence | World |
Success is not primarily a matter of circumstances or native talent or even intelligence – it is a choice.
Choice | Circumstances | Intelligence | Success | Talent |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
All theories, all values, all reforms, all revolutions, all change, and all actions are built on the shifting sands of custom and opinion, and the winds of doubt and new circumstances and considerations are always blowing, always rising.
Change | Circumstances | Custom | Doubt | Opinion | Theories |
Morality is not static but a set of experiments, being gradually worked out by mankind, a dynamic, progressive instrument which we can help ourselves to forge.
The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the massification of society… The individual who is prevented by circumstances from becoming a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be. He lives vicariously and experiences the athletic or amorous or military exploits of the god with whom he lives in spiritual symbiosis.
Action | Circumstances | Cult | God | Hero | Individual | Society | Thought | God | Thought |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
We who lived in the concentration camps can remember those who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing; the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances – to choose one’s own way.
Circumstances | Giving |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent.
Love | Mother | Relationship | Sense | Child |