This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Joan Halifax, fully Roshi Joan Jiko Halifax
In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?
Death | Inevitable | Knowing | Love | Means |
The strong, manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means restraining one’s inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety, love, fear, grief, and hate; and if a man does not give way to these, he can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might be, but I have long known and practiced patience.
Anger | Anxiety | Anxiety | Emotions | Fear | Grief | Hate | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Means | Patience | Understand |
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallible right.
Habit | Life | Life | Means | Right | System | Training | Will |
Zen meditation does not mean sitting and thinking. On the contrary, it means acting with as little thought as possible. The fencing master trained his pupil to guard against every attack with the same immediate, instinctive rapidity with which our eyelid closes over our eye when something threatens it. His work is aimed at breaking down the wall between thought and act, at completely fusing body and senses and mind so that they might all work together rapidly and effortlessly.
Body | Little | Means | Meditation | Mind | Thinking | Thought | Work | Zen | Thought |
Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment… I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Age | Better | Change | Circumstances | Man | Manners | Means | Men | Mind | Progress | Reverence | Sacred | Society | Wisdom | Society | Think | Truths |
Junayd of Bagdad, aka Saint Junayd of Baghdad NULL
Love means that the attributes of the lover are changed into those of the Beloved.
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
To be constantly without desire is the way to have a vision of the mystery of heaven and earth, for constantly to have desire is the means by which their limitations are seen.
Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are pre-existent in the means.
To love means to decide independently to live with an equal partner, and to subordinate oneself to the formulation of a new subject, a “we.”
Anarchism is [not] synonymous with chaos. Translated from the Greek, anarchism means the absence of rulers, or orders – not of rules or order. Order emanates naturally from the free cooperation of persons in a community.
Absence | Cooperation | Means | Order |