This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Susanne Langer, fully Susanne Katherina Langer née Knauth
The continual pursuit of meanings – wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings – is philosophy.
Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini NULL
Peace cannot be limited to a mere absence of war, the result of an ever precarious balance of forces. No, peace is something built up day after day, in the pursuit of an order intended by God, which implies a more perfect form of justice among men and women.
Absence | Balance | Day | God | Justice | Men | Order | Peace | War |
There is basically one problem in life: congestion. There is basically one solution: circulation. Systemic giving is, therefore, a powerful practice that blesses every phase of our lives, as it keeps us attuned to the wealth of the universe.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend: it produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It is the coin of genius, and it is the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice and the wisest economy.
Duty | Important | Justice | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Men | Praise | Reputation | Wealth | Talent |
The world has the wealth and resources to provide everyone the opportunity to live a decent life. We consume too much when market relationships displace the bonds of community, compassion, culture, and place. We consume too much when consumption becomes an end in itself and makes us lose affection and reverence for the natural world.
Compassion | Culture | Life | Life | Opportunity | Reverence | Wealth | World |
In the pursuit of a Truth, a person should discriminate between good and pleasant. He who chooses good attains happiness. He who prefers the pleasant, misses the goal.
Jim Webb, formally James Henry Webb, Jr.
The wealth of a society isn't measured at the top, but at the bottom
There is a difference between happiness and enjoyment. Happiness is the result of pursuing a goal. Pursuit of the goal generates an energizing sense of purpose. Enjoyment, on the other hand, is an immediate sensation of pleasure; a person can enjoy a piece of cake, a piece of art, a good joke – it gives pleasure but then passes.
Art | Enjoyment | Good | Pleasure | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Happiness |
How could sufferings be relieved through purification? To know the Path is to get lost at the ford. Indeed, sickness comes from worldly love and poverty begins with the pursuit of greed.
Unlike Easterners, who are given to meditation, or Westerners, who have an inquisitive turn of mind, we of Africa, belonging neither to the East nor the West, are fundamentally observers, relying more on intuition than on the process of reasoning ... With us, life has always meant the pursuit of Happiness rather than the pursuit of Beauty or Truth.
Beauty | Intuition | Life | Life | Meditation | Mind | Truth | Beauty | Happiness |