This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ramana Maharshi, fully Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi
You have only to disrealize unreality and Reality will appear.
It is certain that the soul is either mortal or immortal. The decision of this question must make a total difference in the principles of morals. Yet philosophers have arranged their moral system entirely independent of this. What an extraordinary blindness!
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker
There is not even a meaning to the word experience which would not presuppose the distinction between past and future.
Distinction | Experience | Future | Meaning | Past |
No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?
Abuse | Advertising | Free speech | Law | Lying | Question | Right | Speech | Time |
In cases of doubtful morality, it is usual to say, Is there any harm in doing this? This question may sometimes be best answered by asking ourselves another: Is there any harm in letting it alone?
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
A noble mind can see a question from all sides without bias. Small minds are biased and see a question only form one side.
We must each find our separate meaning in the persuasion of our days until we meet in the meaning of the world.
Meaning | Persuasion | World |
Daniel Boorstin, fully Daniel Joseph Boorstin
We have come from seeking meaning to finding meaning in the seeking.
Meaning |
Opinion says hot and cold, but the reality is atoms and empty space.
Your ‘personal’ life cannot have a lasting intrinsic meaning. It can acquire a contingent meaning, but only by being fitted into and subordinated to something which ‘lasts’ and has a meaning in itself. Is this something what we attempt to identify when we speak of ‘Life’? Can your life have a meaning as a tiny fragment of life? Does Life exist? Seek and you shall find, experience Life as reality. Has Life a ‘meaning’? Experience Life as reality and the question becomes meaningless. Seek - ? Seek by daring to take the leap into unconditional obedience. Dare this when you are challenged, for only by the light of a challenge will you be able to see the cross-roads and, in full awareness of your choice, turn your back upon your personal life - with no right ever to look back. You will find that ‘in the pattern’ you are liberated from the need to live ‘with the herd’. You will find that, thus subordinated, your life will receive from Life all its meaning, irrespective of the conditions given you for its realization. You will find that the freedom of the continual farewell, the hourly self-surrender, gives to your experience of reality the purity and clarity which signify - seal-realization. You will find that obedience requires an act of will which must continually be re-iterated, and that you will fail, if anything in your personal life is allowed to slip back into the center.
Awareness | Challenge | Choice | Daring | Experience | Freedom | Life | Life | Light | Meaning | Need | Obedience | Purity | Question | Reality | Receive | Right | Self | Surrender | Will | Awareness |
Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
Time doesn't exist; what we refer to as "past" and "future" have no reality except in our own mental constructs. The idea of time is a convention of thought and language, a social agreement; in truth, we only have this moment.
Convention | Future | Language | Past | Reality | Thought | Time | Truth | Thought |
Man is here to experience the unity of his own consciousness, to rise from suffering to perfection, and in the triumph of enlightenment to reclaim the earth as a heaven designed from him. Beneath the mask of suffering, the meaning of life is limitless freedom and the conquest of death.
Conquest | Consciousness | Death | Earth | Enlightenment | Experience | Freedom | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Perfection | Suffering | Unity |
[During dire days under the Nazis] Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he’s called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.
Action | Conscience | Faith | Freedom | God | Life | Life | Man | Principles | Question | Reason | Sacrifice | Virtue | Virtue | God |
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self, for what we wish we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the reality of things.
Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
Expression has a different tone from communication; it involves not only sharing one's own emotional reality but encouraging others to do the same... Emotional self-expression - sharing their authentic feelings honestly and directly and encouraging others to do the same... cultivate empathy but avoid sympathy.