This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We will discover that there are systems and structures that inevitably lead to aggression, exploitation, and war. We have accepted aggression as a way of living. We create and entrench ourselves in structures which culminate in wars. Retaining the structures and avoiding wars is not possible. You and I as individuals have to realize how we are responsible, how we cooperate with the systems and thereby participate in the violence and wars. And then we must begin to inquire whether we can discontinue cooperating with the systems, whether we can stop participating in wars, and explore alternative ways of living for ourselves.
Action | Happy | Individual | Responsibility | Society | Tomorrow | Society | Value |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The punishment of criminals should serve a purpose. When a man is hanged he is useless.
We have moved very far away from love in our collective lives, dangerously near destruction, close to starvation. Perhaps we have the wisdom now, the awareness that love is as essential to human beings as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Love is the beauty, the delicate mystery, the soul of life, the radiant unspoiled purity that brings spontaneous joy, songs of ecstasy, poems, paintings, dances, dramas to celebrate its indescribable, never-to-be-fully-captured bliss of being. Can we bring love into the marketplaces, into the homes, the schools, the places of business, and transform them completely? You may call it a utopian challenge, but it is the only one that will make a significant difference or that is fully worthy of the potential of whole human beings.
Motives | Nations | People | Relationship | Wonder | Value |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
The dreamer sometimes falls into the doldrums, but is said to emerge from them again. And the absent-minded person also makes up for it with bouts of perspicacity. Sometimes he is a person whose right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you, or more usually, you may absent-mindedly allow it to slip from your mind. Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first.
Labor | Melancholy | People |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
Value |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Critic | Feelings | Important | Life | Life | Worship | Value |
Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left...
Achievement | Mankind |
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
So conscience for the sinner distorts the truth of the upright, but (his) soul is in agony at the judgment of the Chinvat Bridge, having strayed by his own deeds and tongue from the Path of Righteousness.
Body | Faith | Knowledge | Life | Life | Mankind | Power | Soul |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Don’t try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Only noise makes mistakes. Silence never makes mistakes.
Self-knowledge | Value |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The only difference in sleeping people is the way they snore.
Value |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it.
Acceptance | Agony | Contentment | Man | Noise | People | Quiet | Words | Wrong | Value |
Meaning is different from explanation and it certainly isn’t blame (no shame no blame really helps with seeing clearly, no?) I asked, “What is the cancer trying to tell me?” What is the story of this tumor? How does it fit into the narrative of my life?” The cancer seemed sweet to me. Well meaning. It was trying to hold all the undigested feelings and experiences I had raced right past in my headstrong, headlong race to save the world. She (the tumor felt like a little girl) became beloved. I owned her as my creation – not as my fault but as my perfectly crafted, unconscious, possibly deadly solution to the complex equation of my life. In one bundle it took on the world’s toxicity and my own reaction to it.
Focus | Fulfillment | Marriage | Value |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic the self-transcendence of human existence. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
Achievement | Dignity | Happy | Inconsistency | Man | People | Present | Sense | Society | Usefulness | Society | Old | Value |