This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
There is no stronger force that you can employ against temptation than wisdom. Complete understanding will bring you to the point where nothing can tempt you to actions that promise pleasure but in the end will only hurt you.
Force | Nothing | Pleasure | Promise | Temptation | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Temptation |
Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli NULL
Every believer in this world of ours must be a spark of light, a center of love, a vivifying leaven amidst his fellowmen, and he will be all this more perfectly the more closely he lives in communion with God and in the intimacy of his own soul.
Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL
Beware of covetousness, which is a malady, diseaseful, incurable. Intimacy with it is impossible, it makes the sweet friend bitter, it alienates the trusted one from his master, it makes father and mother mad… it divorces a man’s wife.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
It is not strange at all that the spread of divorce in a society is accompanied by a diminishing of public morality in all sectors… True love does not exist if it is not faithful. And it cannot exist if it is not honest. Neither can it be in the concrete vocation of matrimony if there is no full promise that lasts until death. Only indissoluble matrimony will be firm and lasting support for the familial community.
Death | Love | Matrimony | Morality | Promise | Public | Society | Will | Society |
Intimacy - the willing revelation of self and absorption in another is a rare thing... those who do tend to view it as a fait accompli rather than as a communal being in need of constant renewal... True intimacy is a human constant... Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together of attention and release of energy.
Attention | Energy | Love | Need | Revelation | Self | Work |
One should not promise a child something and then not give it as he thus teaches the child to lie.
William A. Ward, fully William Arthur Ward
We always expect love to be healing and whole, and then are astonished to find that it can create hollow gaps and empty failures... Our love and our high expectations that it will somehow make life complete seem to be an integral part of the experience. Love seems to promise that life's gaping wounds will close up and heal. It makes little difference that in the past love has shown itself to be painful and disturbing. There is something self-renewing in love.
Experience | Life | Life | Little | Love | Past | Promise | Self | Will |
We are drawn into intimacy by possibilities rather than by realities, by the promise of things to come rather than by proven accomplishments, and perhaps by seductions that are darker than the bright reasons to which we admit.
Promise |
Obsessive, but not genuine self-love leaves no room for intimacy with another.
Eric Berne, born as Leonard Bernstein
Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.
George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
History consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.
Promise |
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
Promise |
There are four dimensions of religious existence, four necessary components of man’s relationships to God: (1) the teaching, the essentials of which are summarized in the form of a creed, which serve as guiding principles in our thinking about matters temporal or eternal, the dimension of the doctrine; (b) faith, inwardness, the direction of one’s heart, the intimacy of religion, the dimension of privacy; (c) the law, or the sacred act to be carried out in the sanctuary in society or at home, the dimension of the deed; (d) the context in which creed, faith, and ritual come to pass, such as the community or the covenant, history, tradition, the dimension of transcendence.
Principles | Sacred | Society | Thinking | Society |
Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
It is a key fact about American policy in Vietnam that the withdrawel of American troops was built into it from the start. None of the presidents who waged war in Vietnam contemplated an open-ended campaign; all promised the public that American troops would be able to leave in the not-too-remote future. The promise of withdrawel precluded a policy of occupation of the traditional colonial sort, in which a great power simply imposes its will on a small one indefinitely.
Occupation | Policy | Power | Promise | Public | War | Will |
Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.