This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert.
Beauty | Freedom | Heart | Power | Universe | World | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.
Freedom |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
One value of self-observation and self-knowledge is to see who you are “not”.
Freedom |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
People fight to preserve their frozen beliefs and then complain of the cold!
Freedom |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Everyone has imaginary ideas of himself as being this or that sort of person. And you can be sure that the images are highly complementary! But since they are purely imaginary, they are highly sensitive to assault by reality.
Every choice has a time cost as well, leaving us famished for time. And we need time to think, dream, love, grieve, care, grow, tend – everything involved in making the human world more humane. It seems impossible to the American mind that limiting individualism, speed and choice could liberate us, but I concluded in those months of cancer-induced stillness that this is precisely what we need. We are like hyper kids exhausting ourselves, unable to stop and longing for a grown-up to tell us to settle down, wash our hands, eat dinner and go to bed. We need to rest . In AA they have a saying, “HALT: Don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired.” Hyper-everything drove us into our consumer addiction. Sobriety is slowing down.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The only way you’re going to have a good relationship with anyone is to have a good relationship with yourself.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious 'Yes' in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. 'Et lux in tenebris lucent'--and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present; that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.
Decision | Dignity | Freedom | Opportunity |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Man's Search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning... Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
Fate | Freedom | Life | Life | Thought | Fate | Friends | Thought |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
Behavior | Decision | Dignity | Freedom | Life | Life | Man | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.
Danger | Freedom | Liberty | Responsibility | Story | Danger |