This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
When you see ordinary situations with extraordinary insight it is like discovering a jewel in rubbish. If work becomes part of your spiritual practice, then your regular, daily problems cease to be only problems and become a source of inspiration. Nothing is rejected as ordinary and nothing is taken as being particularly sacred, but all the substance and material available in life-situations is used.
Neither philosophy, nor morality, nor politics will ever show like itself till man shall be acknowledged for what he really is, a being capable of rectitude, virtue and benevolence, and who needs not always be led to actions of general utility, by foreign and frivolous considerations.
Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
Character | Circumstances | Security | Will | Woman |
Let a clergyman but intend to please God in all his actions, as the happiest and best thing in the world, and then he will know that there is nothing noble in a clergyman but a burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor anything poorer in his profession [than] idleness and a worldly spirit.
Boredom ... causes us to neglect more duties than does interest.
Mass Media will respond that media issues are of great importance because they impact the public trust in news organizations. This ignores the fact that most people already believe Mass Media either makes stuff up, is biased one way or the other, or constantly gets information wrong. Finding out that journalists sometimes invent stories just confirms their preexisting viewpoint.
Innovation | Security | Sense | Survival | Thinking | Will | Loss |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There is no tropical island paradise I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.
Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy.
Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.
Plenty of people despise money, but few know how to give it away.
May I recognize all the manifestations that appear to me in the bardo (intermediate state) as being my own projections; emanations of my own mind. When the bardo of the moment of death appears may I abandon attachments and mental fixations, and engage without distraction in the path which the instructions make clear. Mind projected into the sphere of uncreated space, separated from body, from flesh and blood, I will know that which is impermanence and illusion.
Nothing yet proves that continued progress is inevitable, but that it is possible no one but an extreme skeptic or pessimist can doubt.
Bible | Example | Intelligence | Life | Life | Reflection | Rest | Revelation | Security | Words | Bible |
There is a place for each individual in the world, but you must seek and find where your place is and where you fit in. If you are afraid to take the responsibility of bringing in the new, do not try to stop those souls who are willing to do it. Realize that those souls who have been trained and inspired to undertake this task will do so, for it is their work. Find your rightful place in the whole vast plan, and if you are not in the front line do not let it disturb you. Remember, all sorts of people are needed to make up the whole. Simply accept your specific work and do what you know you have to do wholeheartedly, and allow those souls who have been placed in the position of leadership and responsibility to go ahead. Give them your full backing and complete loyalty; they need it and appreciate it. Lift up your heart in deep love praise and gratitude for them, and always give of your very best.
I don't for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have -- women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same. This country would go bankrupt in a day if the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the powers-that-be to pay back wages to children of slaves and to the women who've worked all their lives for half wages or no pay.
Family | Future | Government | Men | Government |