This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
Absolute | Change | Comfort | Compensation | Doubt | Habit | Harmony | Instinct | Intelligence | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Need | Property | Question | Quiet | Security | Society | Wealth | World | Society | Intellect | Think |
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
Habit | Instinct | Intelligence | Need |
Thrift is a habit. A habit is a thing you do unconsciously or automatically, without thought. We are ruled by our habits... The habit of thrift proves your power to rule your own psychic self. You are the captain of your soul. You are able to take care of yourself, and then out of the excess of your strength you produce a surplus.
Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly with mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your own profession. Do not indulge yourselves to judge of things by the first glimpse, or a short and superficial view of them; for this will fill the mind with errors and prejudices, and give it a wrong turn and ill habit of thinking, and make much work for retraction.
Henry Van Dyke, fully Henry Jackson Van Dyke
As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.
The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.
Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth--of carefully respecting the property of others--of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing.
Hildegard Von Bingen, Blessed Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Hildegard
With nature's help, humankind can set into creation all that is necessary and life sustaining.
Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the 'prebiotic soup.'
As long as the mind, which is the result, the focal point of sensation, regards sex as a means of its release, sex must be a problem, and that problem will continue as long as we are incapable of being creative comprehensively, totally, and not merely in one particular direction. Creativeness has nothing to do with sensation. Sex is of the mind, and creation is not of the mind. Creation is never a product of the mind, a product of thought, and in that sense, sex, which is sensation, can never be creative. It may produce babies, but that is obviously not creativeness. As long as we depend for release on sensation, on stimulation in any form, there must be frustration, because the mind becomes incapable of realizing what creativeness is.
Without love, marriage becomes, for man or for woman, a source of gratification, of conflict, of fear and pain. Love comes into being only when the self is absent. Without love, relationship is sorrow, however physically exciting it might be; such relationship breeds contention and frustration, habit and routine. Without love there can be no chastity, and sex becomes an all-consuming problem.
Contention | Fear | Habit | Love | Man | Marriage | Relationship | Self |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop livin
Habit |
The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
The epoch of intense cold which preceded the present creation has been only a temporary oscillation of the earth's temperature, more important than the century-long phases of cooling undergone by the Alpine valleys. It was associated with the disappearance of the animals of the diluvial epoch of the geologists, as still demonstrated by the Siberian mammoths; it preceded the uplifting of the Alps and the appearance of the present-day living organisms, as demonstrated by the moraines and the existence of fishes in our lakes. Consequently, there is complete separation between the present creation and the preceding ones, and if living species are sometimes almost identical to those buried inside the earth, we nevertheless cannot assume that the former are direct descendants of the latter or, in other words, that they represent identical species.
Appearance | Existence | Important | Present |
Gratitude is indeed like a gearshift that can move our mental mechanism from obsession to peacefulness, from stuckness to creativity, from fear to love. The ability to relax and be mindfully present in the moment comes naturally when we are grateful.
The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits... [The Scripture] teaches us that we must not think of man's real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love.
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.
Habit |