This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Suffering is the essence of life, because it is the inevitable product of an unresolved tension between a living creature’s essential impulse to try to make itself into the centre of the Universe and its essential dependence on the rest of Creation and on the Absolute Reality.
Absolute | Dependence | Impulse | Inevitable | Life | Life | Reality | Rest | Suffering | Universe |
Confidence always pleases those who receive it. It is a tribute we pay to their merit, a deposit we commit to their trust, a ledge that gives them to claim upon us, a kind of dependence to which we voluntarily submit.
Confidence | Dependence | Merit | Receive | Trust |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will... There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.
Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
In the Kingdom of God there are no claims, but only love, which, as something which cannot be coordinated into a given structure, knows no calculations. All claimfulness is overcome because it is realized that complete dependence and freedom, human dignity and divine grace, are not opposites as the autonomous self-centered man supposes.
Dependence | Dignity | Freedom | God | Grace | Love | Man | Self | God |
Commerce links all mankind in one common brother hood of mutual dependence and interests.
Commerce | Dependence | Mankind |
There is no dependence that can be sure but a dependence upon one's self.
Dependence | Self |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Moral codes have become necessary because evolution, in liberating humankind from complete dependence on instincts, has also made it possible for us to act with malice that no organism ruled by instincts alone could possess.
Dependence | Evolution | Malice | Moral codes |
Nāgārjuna, fully Acharya Nāgārjuna NULL
Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.
Dependence | Nature | Nothing |
Addictive spirituality creates dependence in the practitioner (frequently to authoritarian leaders and their communities), an avoidance of personal responsibility, and loss of individuality through social controls, such as fear, guilt, or greed for power or bliss. It also tends to suppress rational inquiry into the teachings. Healthy spirituality, on the other hand, supports the practitioner's freedom, autonomy, self-esteem, and social responsibility. It is based on experience, rather than belief or dogma; it does not create idols out of spiritual teachers; and it empowers students by emphasizing democratic forms of learning and teaching, rather than the authoritarian model that has dominated spiritual life for millennia.
Belief | Dependence | Dogma | Esteem | Experience | Fear | Freedom | Greed | Guilt | Individuality | Inquiry | Learning | Life | Life | Model | Power | Responsibility | Self | Self-esteem | Spirituality | Loss |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
The art of humility begins with a recognition of our dependence on others and an appreciation of God’s gift of life... He discovers that those of a gentle spirit do have the earth for their possession; that humility opens the gates of the mind and heart so greatness can flow through.
Appreciation | Art | Dependence | Earth | God | Greatness | Heart | Humility | Life | Life | Mind | Spirit | Appreciation | Art |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
By incestuous symbiosis is meant the tendency to stay tied to the mother and to her equivalents — blood, family, tribe — to fly from the unbearable weight of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness, and to be protected and loved in a state of certainty dependence that the individual pays for with the ceasing of his own human development.
Dependence | Individual | Mother |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.
A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it. I should be happy that my own experience had afforded fewer examples of the little dependence to be placed upon them.
Acquaintance | Dependence | Experience | Good | Happy | Little | Will | World |
The theory of dependence will take the wrong path and lead to deception if the analysis is not put within the framework of the worldwide class struggle
Dependence | Will | Wrong |
Our dependence outweighs our independence, for we are independent only in our desire, while we are dependent on our health, on nature, on society, on everything in us and outside us.
From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone — an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.
Capacity | Danger | Dependence | Illusion | Individual | Insanity | Power | Suffering | Will | Danger |
Economy is integrity and profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debts; that is, fetters them with irons that enter into their souls.
Dependence | Integrity |
Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those of veneration for our forefathers, and of love for our posterity. They form the connecting links between the selfish and the social passions. By the fundamental principle of Christianity, the happiness of the individual is Later-woven, by innumerable and imperceptible ties, with that of his contemporaries: by the power of filial reverence and parental affection, individual existence is extended beyond the limits of individual life, and the happiness of every age is chained in mutual dependence upon that of every other.
Age | Dependence | Existence | Individual | Love | Power | Reverence | Happiness |