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
That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.
Conversation | Quiet |
At any moment each person is always doing the VERY BEST he can, based on his total conscious and non-conscious prevailing awareness and which is within his capabilities, energy, time, and developed talents and abilities. If people are always doing the very best they can, it is illogical and irrational to expect them to do better. What is the reason this concept is so important to understand? If it is true, then it is counterproductive to criticize someone for not meeting or conforming to an expectation or standard until they have the awareness of the benefits they will receive by conforming. What needs to exist is for people to be made aware of how they will get better results, by pointing out the consequences of their behavior and giving them the choice and opportunity to make adjustments.
Conversation | Disease | Nothing | Words |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.
Conversation | Man | Old |
Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock
And the lighthouse keeper knows that it is his only daughter—the only one that he has—who is being cast to death upon the reef. Then comes the dilemma. They want him for the lifeboat; no one can take it through the surf but him. You know that because the other man says so himself.
Art | Conversation | Pleasure | Will | Art |
The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.
Behavior | Conversation | Hypothesis | Man | Reputation |
We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable.
Conversation | Listening | Talking |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
But for him it was music - music when it was just that only, and against the word of Goethe: 'The art deals with the heavy and the good guys, he found objectionable, that the light is too hard if it's good what it may be as well as the severity. Some of them got stuck with me, I got it from him. However, I've always taken to mean that one must be very versed in Hard and good, so to receive the Light.
In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with. - from No Man is an Island
Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
When you know a lot, it’s all too easy to start teaching. But coaching is about helping him discover what he already knows, or can find out for himself. Teaching takes a long time and is about imparting knowledge. Coaching can be viewed not so much as a process of adding as it is a process of subtracting, or unlearning whatever is getting in the way of movement toward the client’s desired goal.
Conversation | Important | Learning | Purpose | Purpose | Think |
We are called to be strong companions and clear mirrors to one another, to seek those who reflect with compassion and a keen eye how we are doing, whether we seem centered or off course ... we need the nourishing company of others to create the circle needed for growth, freedom and healing.
Conversation | Day | Eternal | Growth | Land |
If you’re going to have sustainable agriculture, it has to be adapted locally. Local adaptation means that you observe in the economic landscape the same processes that you find in healthy natural landscapes: You must have diversity. You must have both plants and animals. You must waste nothing. You must obey the law of return — that is, you must return to the ground all the nutrients that you take from it. You must protect the soil from erosion at all times. You must make maximum use of sunlight. In those circumstances, you may leave the crops and animals pretty much to fend for themselves against diseases. The farm will have some disease, but it won’t have epidemics. If you look at a healthy forest, for instance, you see some prematurely dead trees, but not massive numbers of them. … It’s the diametric opposite of reductive science, and industrial agriculture is based on reductive science.
Citizenship | Conversation | Right |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.
Chance | Conversation |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear, she thought; once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take cream? And mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong.
Beauty | Conversation | Little | Space | Spirit | Wise | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.
Conversation | Spirit | Wise |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you---how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions.
Beauty | Conversation | Little | Space | Spirit | Wise | Beauty |
So long as man is a child, God wills him to be innocent.
Appearance | Contempt | Conversation | Ends | Past | Pity | Old |