This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.
Meaning |
True sanctity does not consist in trying to live without creatures. It consists in using the goods of life in order to do the will of God. It consists in using God’s creation in such a way that everything we touch and see and use and love gives new glory to God. To be a saint means to pass through the world gathering fruits for heaven from every tree and reaping God’s glory in every field. The saint is one who is in contact with God in every possible way, in every possible direction. He is united to God by the depths of his own being. He sees and touches God in everything and everyone around him. Everywhere he goes, the world rings and resounds (though silently) with the deep harmonies of God’s glory.
Convention | Evasion | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Problems | Responsibility | System | Time | Tradition | Work | Understand |
Beyond the forms there is . . . the intimation of a transcending, limitless truth. This infinite becomes in part available to us within the finite, through these finite channels that a society inherits and cherishes, and uses to express its faith and to nourish it. Can we learn something of that faith, and appreciate in part that inner meaning, by exploring the significance of these outward forms?
Failure | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Phenomena | Religion | Universe | Failure |
Act…is always identified with the fully complete, the actually present. Pure act, therefore, is simply a correlative of the immutable, i.e., of pure actualized form, complete in all that is proper to it and incorruptible. It is this immutability, self-sufficiency, and incorruptibility which for Aristotle is the primary characteristic of the “divine” and the perfect. In the notion of act so conceived there is no necessary implication of infinity, at least in the substantial order. In fact, Aristotle has no difficulty in admitting some fifty five of his prime movers, each one pure act or pure form but in virtue of its form distinct from all others. Substantial infinity would simply have no meaning in this Aristotelian universe
Determination | Excellence | Meaning | Mind | Right | Universe | Excellence |
W. D. Joske, fully William "Bill"
However, few of us have such high expectations, and we are content to perform tasks that are not fully meaningful. We will endure drudgery if we can accomplish something worthwhile, and we are happy playing pointless games.
Giving | Life | Life | Meaning | Society | Wants | World | Society |
William P. Montague, fully William Pepperell Montague
Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it.
Difficulty | Meaning | Virtue | Virtue |
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
This perpetual struggle between the magician and the religionist goes on in the mind and heart and will of every man of us. It goes on until it is rightly resolved, until man reborn into a mature religion ceases to try to coerce his God, and says humbly with Dante, “In thy will is our peace.” Religion, then, is not a matter of turning God to account in the realization of our own desires. Religion is trying to discover what God is about and then offering oneself to the Eternal Goodness, “as a man’s hand is to a man.” “It is not in man,” says a modern thinker, “to make religion what he will have her be, but only to become what religion is making him.” Perhaps, then, it is to save a man from the defeat and disillusionment of childish magic that there stands in our Bible that old story of the temptation of Jesus. Its ramifications and restatements are legion. Thou shalt not use thy God to get thy way. Thou shalt not coerce the Infinite to further the headstrong passing whim of the finite. Thou shalt not break the laws of health and then cajole thy God into working thee a miracle of healing. Thou shalt not let thy mind rot in idleness and then look for a sudden inspiration given by reality. Thou shalt not spend thine all upon the world that passes away and ask thy God at thy latter end to give thee the sudden boon of a credible immortality. Thou shalt not take this attitude at all, using the Most High as an amplifier and emergency device for realizing thy solitary and selfish will. “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” We are being told on all sides that religion is now breaking down, that its beliefs are an outworn delusion, and that all thoughtful men are being liberated into a perfect skepticism. That is not what is happening. What is happening is this, men are discovering again what they have discovered often before and then have forgotten, that magic will not work. But religion as a final attitude and reference of the finite human spirit towards its infinite universe remains and always must remain. It is the disposition of those disciplined natures of whom we say that they are pure in mind and heart and will. The true alternative to the outworn magic of primitive peoples is not the modern magic of persons disciplined in the applied sciences or the “new thought.” It is no solution of the ultimate moral and intellectual problem to trade self-will from the left hand of primitive magic to the right hand of applied science. What matters is a changed disposition and reference in this whole final commerce of man with his universe. Call it pure religion or pure science, the name does not matter. The one thing needful is that temper and disposition towards the will of God which we find in Jesus, Bernard, Pascal and Lister alike.
Control | Distinction | God | Lord | Man | Meaning | Men | Obedience | Religion | Science | Society | Temptation | Time | Universe | World | Society | Trial | God | Temptation |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
Even by means of our sorrows we belong to the eternal plan.
Experience | Life | Life | Meaning | Spirit | Teach | Unconsciousness |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.
I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life.
Art | Better | Error | Existence | Insight | Labor | Meaning | Nature | Perfection | Research | Thought | Will | Work | World | Art | Learn | Think | Thought |
Sexual anxiety is caused by the external frustration of instinctual gratification and is internally anchored by the fear of the dammed-up sexual excitation. This leads to orgasm anxiety, which is the ego's fear of the over-powering excitation of the genital system due to its estrangement from the experience of pleasure. Orgasm anxiety constitutes the core of the universal, biologically anchored pleasure anxiety. It is usually expressed as a general anxiety about every form of vegetative sensation and excitation, or the perception of such excitation and sensations. The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.
Meaning | Understand |