This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Subconsciously (particularly in the West), we still expect that limitless expansion - moving on, growing, and building a place of our own – will always be the intrinsic state of affairs. Expansion is necessary for life’s continued development – even expansion into space, throughout our galaxy and into others beyond. Evolutionary change occurs only when possible and advantageous; when niches open up, when food supplies vary, or when a mutation confers a bonus. If niches never alter, change brings penalty, not reward. If we choose zero growth, if we immobilize our niche, we will cease evolving. Without challenge, we do not advance.
Challenge | Change | Growth | Life | Life | Reward | Space | Will |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.
Bertrand de Jouvenel, fully Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins
Ever increase of state authority must involve an immediate diminution of the liberty of each citizen.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
I believe in immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. I believe that the state we enter after death is wrought of our own motives, thoughts, and deeds... I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.
Death | Deeds | Faith | Heart | Immortality | Joy | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Magic | Motives | Soul |
Mahāyāna Religious Ideal "Great Vehicle" NULL
The cause of all suffering is rooted in desire. If the desire is extinguished suffering has no foot hold.
If you pursue happiness as the ultimate goal of your living, you will be drifting away from happiness and your real being. Happiness is not a transcendental state of mind that is very difficult to have. It is the joyful expression of enlightened mind and is born of unconditional love.
Mary Lyon, fully Mary Mason Lyon
Nine-tenths of our suffering is caused by others not thinking so much of us as we think they ought.
Toleration… is not true liberty when it is only a gracious concession by the state to the individual. Gracious concessions are incompatible with liberty of religion which is not something that a state, or an absolutist church offers, but that which the citizen claims and the law protects.
Church | Individual | Law | Liberty | Religion | Toleration |
Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
Universal love… means that one makes no distinction between the state of others and one’s own; none between the houses of other and one’s own; none between the other person and oneself.
Distinction | Love | Means |
Paula Ripple, fully Paula Ripple Comin
Neither power nor wealth, neither education nor ability, neither gifts of creativity nor stores of human energy can insure against the reality that suffering will be our companion at some time during our journey. It is a presence as inseparable from the human condition as food and oxygen are from human life. It is part of our legacy.
Ability | Creativity | Education | Energy | Journey | Life | Life | Power | Reality | Suffering | Time | Wealth | Will |
Most religions are absolutist. Claims to revelation militate against rational argument and compromise. In this sense all religions contain totalitarian possibilities; for totalitarianism, which welds the state into a single body “knit together as one man” is really the religious impulse, the worship of leadership and ideology, the cult of Person or Book, directed towards secular ends.
Argument | Body | Cult | Ends | Impulse | Man | Revelation | Sense | Worship | Leadership |
Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin
The Buddha, that is now “Awakened One,” diagnosed the human condition in the following way. Life is out of balance and characterized by suffering because all things are impermanent, and yet we desire things as if they were permanent. We each view our own self as if it too were permanent and completely independent from our selves, and so we think of our self as competing for those things with other discrete selves. Everything that we desire will ultimately pass away – we cannot hold on to anything in the end, not even our own bodies and minds – so our inappropriate desires are frustrated and we suffer, only to be reborn again into anew life of desire and suffering. To break the cycle of rebirth (samsara), we must overcome our ignorance about the true nature of things, cut the root of desire, and give up attachment to self, for we are anatman, no-self.
Balance | Desire | Ignorance | Life | Life | Nature | Self | Suffering | Will | Following | Think |
Man is but a short, critical stage between the animal and the spiritual. His state is one of constant wavering, of soaring and descending. Undeviating humanity is nonexistent. The emancipated man is yet to emerge.
Temporality and uninterruptedness express the relation of existence to time, a passive relation. What distinguishes organic from inorganic existence is the fact that the plant or the animal stands in an active and defensive relation to temporality… Life, we know from biology, is not a passive state of indifference, and inertia. The essence of life is intense care and concern.
Care | Existence | Indifference | Life | Life | Organic | Time |