This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Gayety is to good humor, as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance: the one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them.
Daughter | Dependence | Poverty | Will | Parent |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as "right" in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as "brute force."
Dependence | Men | Mistake | Model | Parents | People | Will |
When we believe that we ought to be satisfied, rather than God glorified, we set God below ourselves, imagine that He should submit His own honor to our advantage; we make ourselves more glorious than God, as though we were not made for Him, but He made for us; this is to have a very low esteem of the majesty of God.
Blessings | Change | Dependence | Desire | Discovery | Father | Giving | God | Industry | Influence | Light | Man | Means | Prayer | Promise | Receive | Wisdom | Discovery | God |
Prophecy is not an art, nor (when it is taken for prediction) a constant vocation, but an extraordinary and temporary employment from God, most often of good men, but sometimes also of the wicked.
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Dependence | Example | Fear | Glory | Government | Labor | Means | People | Precedent | Public | Society | Stewardship | Time | Title | Trust | Society | Government |
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise...
Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.
Dependence | Nature | Sense | Wrong |
The legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions.
Dependence | Will |
Our part is to pursue with steadiness what is right, turning neither to right nor left for the intrigues or popular delusions of the day, assured that the public approbation will in the end be with us.
Dependence | Fear | Object | Spirit |
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, it’s necessary consequence.
Dependence | Rights |
Were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask respecting a candidate would be, Does he use ardent spirits?
Argument | Belief | Body | Confidence | Dependence | Evidence | Faith | Fear | God | Hypocrisy | Influence | Lord | Man | Men | Mind | Money | Nothing | Object | Opinion | Plan | Power | Presumption | Principles | Public | Reason | Religion | Rights | Thinking | Trust | Truth | Will | World | God |
God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief… than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life He listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it.
Action | Contemplation | Dependence | Experience | Faith | God | Grace | Knowing | Life | Life | Meaning | Peace | Reason | Salvation | Thought | Trust | God | Contemplation | Thought |
Prayers and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain our own instinct for violence and aggressiveness in our relations with other people. We may never succeed in this campaign, but whether we succeed or not, the duty is evident. It is the great task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it. We must at least face this responsibility and do something about it. And the first job of all is to understand the psychological forces at work in ourselves and in society.
Absolute | Dependence | God | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Man | Need | Perfection | Prayer | God |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without.
Defeat | Dependence | Doctrine | Heart | Knowing | Knowledge | Language | Literature | Means | Method | Mind | People | Popularity | Time | Understanding |
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
Control | Dependence | Economics | Era | Failure | Freedom | Need | Nothing | People | Politics | Rationality | Society | System | Will | World | Worry | Society | Failure |
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
Abstract | Art | Dependence | Earth | Family | Giving | Good | Guilt | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Need | Present | Thought | Usefulness | Work | Art | Guilty | Thought |
Every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Love someone who doesn't deserve it. Plant sequoias. Be joyful even though you've considered the facts. Practice resurrection.
Dependence | Experience | Ignorance | Pleasure |
History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending? One thing worth defending, I suggest, is the imperative to imagine the lives of beings who are not ourselves and are not like ourselves: animals, plants, gods, spirits, people of other countries, other races, people of the other sex, places and enemies.
Dependence | Example |
To imply by the word "terrorism" that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of "terrorists" is misleading. The "legitimate" warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. The distinction between the intention to perpetrate violence against innocents, as in "terrorism," and the willingness to do so, as in "war," is not a source of comfort.
Art | Dependence | Husband | Land | Life | Life | People | Practice | Art | Old |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.
Dependence | God | Nature | God |