This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our eyes see only by permission of the mind... Truly our minds can be barriers, not because of the knowledge they acquire, but because of the intellectual habit of interpreting the unknown in terms of the known. The spiritual transcendent and the mind not only suffers defeat in trying to interpret it, but also blocks reception of the formless Real
I’m convinced that time has no existence in the mind at all. We partition time out of necessity, so that if I say I will be somewhere at 1 o’clock, we agree on what 1 o’clock is. Civilization couldn’t function otherwise. But our minds are a swirling mass of images and recollections that are connected, and it’s the connections that count.
A person who does not know how to use his mind productively will flee from the state of being alone. But when a person has leaned to think, he will greatly appreciate the moments when he is by himself, for then he will be able to utilize those moments for intellectual and spiritual growth. In fact, moments of solitude serve as tests to a person to clarify how thinking-oriented he really is.
The human mind turned downwards takes cognizance of the world reported to it by the senses; turned upwards it receives intuitional knowledge and directions from pure intelligence, which is its source and essence... The mind finds itself not merely cognizing and arranging the world reported by the senses but striving to rule it and in fact ruled by it. This is a cruel paradox, for by desiring one thing and fearing another the pseudo-self or ego subordinates itself to the senses and the world they report. Thus it comes to be torn between conflicting passions and subject to the tyranny of events.
Ego | Events | Intelligence | Knowledge | Mind | Paradox | Rule | Self | Tyranny | World |
Normal perception is completely controlled by the unconscious mind which obeys suggestions implicitly.
Mind | Perception |
Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
Mind cannot be reduced to body, nor can mind be expressed without some form we call body. We are faced with a primal duality at the root of manifestation.
Music... stand quite alone. It is cut off from all the other arts... It does not express a particular and definite joy, sorrow, anguish, horror, delight, or mood of peace, but joy, sorrow, anguish, horror, delight, peace of mind themselves, in the abstract, in their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their customary motives. Yet it enables us to grasp and share them fully in this quintessence.
Abstract | Joy | Mind | Motives | Music | Nature | Peace | Sorrow |
Joy and sorrow are not ideas of the mind but affections of the will, and so they do not lie in the domain of memory. We cannot recall our joys and sorrows; by which I mean we cannot renew them. We can recall only the ideas that accompanied them; and, in particular, the things we were led to say; and these form a gauge of our feelings at the time. Hence our memory of joys and sorrows is always imperfect, and they become a matter of indifference to us as soon as they are over.
Feelings | Ideas | Indifference | Joy | Memory | Mind | Sorrow | Time | Will |
Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL
If the mind be not quite pure, the actions can't be acceptable.
Mind |
There is no limit to what people can do, or where they can go, if they don't mind who gets the credit.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.
Mind |
A brand new mediocrity is thought more of than accustomed excellence.
Excellence | Mediocrity | Thought | Thought |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action.
Action | Experience | Thought | Child | Thought |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Amusement to an observing mind is study.