This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is only wickedness and dark voluptuousness and enmity against humankind, if it is given power over our thought and contemplation. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up.
Art | Destroy | Good | Hate | Knowledge | Suffering | Art | Think |
Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. ... The thing about this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no mystery. All problems are resolved and everything is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya… everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. The whole thing is very much a Zen garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence, and the great figures, motionless, yet with the lines in full movement, waves of vesture and bodily form, a beautiful and holy vision. [On contemplating statues of Gautama Buddha]
Action | Better | Learning | Light | Means | People | Spirit | Understanding | Weakness | Obstacle |
Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.
Contemplation | Day | Desolation | Devotion | Discipline | God | Joy | Justice | Labor | Magic | Obscurity | Obscurity | Peace | Relationship | Security | Spirit | Suffering | World | God | Contemplation | Happiness |
The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.
Death | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Pain | Preference | Suffering | World |
If men will permit themselves to think, as rational beings ought to think, nothing can appear more ridiculous and absurd, exclusive of all moral reflections, than to be at the expense of building navies, filling them with men, and then hauling them into the ocean, to try which can sink each other fastester. Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with infinitely more advantage than any victory with all its expense. But this, though it best answers the purpose of Nations, does not that of Court Governments, whose habited policy is pretense for taxation, places, and offices.
When the objective self contemplates pain, it has to do so thought the perspective of the sufferer, and the sufferer’s reaction is very clear. Of course he wants to be rid of this pain unreflectively—not because he thinks it would be good to reduce the amount of pain in the world. But at the same time his awareness of how bad it is doesn’t essentially involve the thought of it as his. The desire to be rid of pain has only the pain as its object. This is shown by the fact that it doesn’t even require the idea of oneself in order to make sense: if I lacked or lost the conception of myself as distinct from other possible or actual persons, I could still apprehend the badness of pain, immediately. So when I consider it from an objective standpoint, the ego doesn’t get between the pain and the objective self. My objective attitude toward pain is rightly taken over from the immediate attitude of the subject, and naturally takes the form of an evaluation of the pain itself, rather than merely a judgment of what would be reasonable for its victim to want: “This experience ought not to go on, whoever is having it.” To regard pain as impersonally bad from the objective standpoint does not involve the illegitimate suppression of an essential reference to the identity of its victim. In its most primitive form, the fact that it is mine—the concept of myself—doesn’t come into my perception of the badness of my pain.
I know not how it comes to pass, but many are so delighted to hear themselves that they are a cumber to the ears of all other, pleasing their auditors in nothing more than in the pause of a full point.
The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out.
An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. Neither the Channel nor the Rhine will arrest its progress. It will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.
Folly | Good | Happy | Heart | Language | Nothing | Object | Property | Resentment | Sorrow | Suffering | War |
Thomas Cronin, fully Thomas Edward Cronin
We understand much of what is involved in leadership -- vision, strategy, cooperation, integrity, trust, intuition, goal-setting, motivation, mobilization, productivity, and renewal. Yet paradoxically, however much we admire, appreciate, and recognize it, precise definitions remain elusive. Yet we do know that leadership is all about making things (good and bad) happen that might not otherwise happen and preventing things from happening that ordinarily would happen. It is the process of getting people to work together to achieve common goals and aspirations. Leadership is a process that helps people transform intentions into positive action, visions into reality. Leadership involves the infusion of vision, direction, and purpose into an enterprise and entails mobilizing both people and resources to undertake and achieve shared ends.
Angels | Dawn | Heart | Life | Life | Longing | Love | Smile | Suffering | Tears |
T. E. Hulme, fully Thomas Ernest Hulme
An illusion is the false appreciation of real sensation.
Learning | People | Principles | Study | Teach |
Thomas Cronin, fully Thomas Edward Cronin
Great teachers know that they are always on stage and that who they are, how they act, and what they believe are as important as what they teach. Teaching, like leadership, is a performing art. Nonverbal behavior -- eye contact, posture, tone of voice, intensity, facial expression, and attitude -- have as much impact as, if not more than, what is said. Whether people listen to and believe, as opposed to just hear, a teacher depends on a host of variables.
He marks, and makes the golden world our own, Content with hands unsoil'd to guard the prize, And keep the store with undesiring eyes. So round the tree, that bore Hesperian gold, The sacred watch lay curl'd in many a fold, His eyes up-rearing to th' untasted prey, The sleepless guardian wasted life away.
Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
When you know a lot, it’s all too easy to start teaching. But coaching is about helping him discover what he already knows, or can find out for himself. Teaching takes a long time and is about imparting knowledge. Coaching can be viewed not so much as a process of adding as it is a process of subtracting, or unlearning whatever is getting in the way of movement toward the client’s desired goal.
Conversation | Important | Learning | Purpose | Purpose | Think |
W. Ian Thomas, fully Walter Ian Thomas
That is the work of God. It is your living faith in the adequacy of the One who is in you, which releases His divine action through you. It is the kind of activity that the Bible calls "good works," as opposed to "dead works."