This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean.
Self-inspection - the best cure for self-esteem... By all means sometimes be alone; salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear; dare to look in thy chest, and tumble up and down what thou findest there.
You often hear the remark that “there is no harm in a glass of wine per se.” Per se means by itself. Certainly there is no harm in a glass of wine by itself. Place a glass of wine one a shelf and let it remain there, and it is per se, and will harm no one. But if you turn it inside a man, then it is no longer per se.
Habits - the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction.
The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.
R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth
To teach Zen means to unteach; to see life steadily and see it whole, the answer not being divided from the question; no parrying, dodging, countering, solving, changing the words; an activity which is a physical and spiritual unity with All-Activity.
Life | Life | Means | Question | Teach | Unity | Wisdom | Words | Zen |
Clive Bell, fully Arthur Clive Heward Bell
Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means similar states of mind.
Aesthetic | Art | Ecstasy | Family | Means | Men | Mind | Religion | Wisdom | Art | Circumstance |
Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was means and made to do because he is still, in spite of it all, the child of God.
Day | Deeds | Desire | God | Life | Life | Man | Means | Soul | Thinking | Will | Wisdom | Deeds | Child |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Diseases are the penalties we pay for overindulgence, or for our neglect of the means of health... We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more, from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares. They fatigued only the muscles; we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.
Religious addiction is using God, the Church, or a belief system as an escape from reality, in an attempt to find or elevate a sense of self-worth or well-being... It is the ultimate form of co-dependency - feeling worthless in and of ourselves and looking outside for something or someone to tell us we are worthwhile... Recovery means discovering divinity in one's own life.
Addiction | Belief | Church | Divinity | God | Life | Life | Means | Reality | Self | Self-worth | Sense | System | Wisdom | Worth |
Love means that the adults be genuinely concerned with the evolution of the true nature of the child. Children are not able to respond to a love which tries to fashion them according to the concept of the adult, no matter how good the latter's intention may be.
Children | Evolution | Good | Intention | Love | Means | Nature | Wisdom |
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
Providence is the very divine reason which arranges all things, and rests with the supreme disposer of all; while fate is that ordering which is a part of all changeable things, and by means of which Providence binds all things together in their own order. Providence embraces all things equally, however different they may be, even however infinite: when they are assigned to their own places, forms, and times, Fate sets them in an orderly motion; so that this development of the temporal order, unified in the intelligence of the mind of God, is Providence. The working of this unified development in time is called Fate. These are different, but the one hangs upon the other. For this order, which is ruled by Fate, emanates from the directness of Providence.
Fate | God | Intelligence | Means | Mind | Order | Providence | Reason | Time | Wisdom | Fate |