This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A myth is a collective 'dream' of an entire people at a certain point in their history... But a myth not only lives in literature and imagination, it immediately finds its way into the behavior and attitudes of the culture - into the practical daily lives of the people.
Behavior | Culture | History | Imagination | Literature | Myth | People | Wisdom |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Let life teach you what spirit it... By conforming to spiritual ideals imposed from the outside through the force of tradition, people often channel themselves into models of behavior that violate their inner essence. We are all guaranteed realization when we strip away our pre-conceived notions about spiritual perfection, give up striving form some idealized end-point called 'enlightenment,' and discover the magnificence of what we already are and live that fully.
Behavior | Enlightenment | Force | Ideals | Life | Life | People | Perfection | Spirit | Teach | Tradition | Wisdom |
Yellow Emperor's Canon of Internal Medicine NULL
To administer medicine to diseases which have already developed and thereby suppress bodily chaos which has already occurred is comparable to the behavior of those who would begin to dig a well after they have grown thirsty, or those who would begin to cast weapons after they have engaged in battle.
Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, simply known as Ali NULL
A man’s behavior is the index of the man, and his discourse is the index of his understanding.
Behavior | Man | Understanding |
Cultures can mix with one another. Explicit design is introduced to promote, improve, advance, and accelerate the evolutionary process of culture. A change brought about by a science and technology of behavior would correspond to a `biological mutation’ towards the better… Yet the final determining cause, whether genetic or cultural, is never an ethical or moral one, but always leads back to the environment. The world is a large-scale laboratory. Both the controller and the controlled are subject to conditioning. All life is conditioning.
Behavior | Better | Cause | Change | Culture | Design | Life | Life | Science | Technology | World |
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Behavior | Death | Education | Fear | Hope | Man | Punishment | Reward | Sympathy |
At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.
Behavior | Education | Ideas | Important | Indispensable | Money | Occupation | People | Style | Taste | Work | Think |
Whatever else religion may be, it is also anthropology - in the sense that it fosters conceptions of human authenticity on whose basis moral codes can be drawn up and the actual behavior of individuals and societies assessed, challenged, and altered. Religion speaks not only of the divine but of the divine intention for the human.
Authenticity | Behavior | Intention | Moral codes | Religion | Sense | Moral codes |
The behavior of the universe on a very large scale seems to be simple and not chaotic.
Values are goals which behavior strives to realize. Any activity which is oriented toward the accomplishment of some end is a value-oriented activity.
Accomplishment | Behavior | Goals |
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Religion is behavior and not mere belief.
Religion is an explanation (Creed) of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live (Code and Community–structure) accordingly, which is based on the notion of the Transcendent (Cult). Because Religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life it provides a code of behavior in the fullest possible sense, including all the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of human life, and is hence a “Way of Life” – for humans.
Behavior | Creed | Cult | Life | Life | Meaning | Religion | Sense |
When it comes to more complex behavior mathematics has never in fact done well at explaining most of what we see every day in nature.
Behavior | Day | Mathematics | Nature |
Computational irreducibility tends to make infinite questions undecidable. The presence of universality implies that there must at some level be computational irreducibility… This means that today’s mathematics will be viewed as small and surprisingly uncharacteristic sample of what is possible. If a system is computationally irreducible this means that there is in effect a tangible separation between the underlying rules for the system and its overall behavior associated with the irreducible amount of computational work needed to go from one to the other. And it is this separation that the basic origin of the apparent freedom we see in all sorts of system lie – whether those systems are abstract cellular automata or actual living brains.
Abstract | Behavior | Freedom | Mathematics | Means | System | Will | Work |
Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr
We have been forced step by step to forgo a causal description of the behavior of individual atoms in space and time, and to reckon with a free choice on the part of nature between various possibilities.
Behavior | Choice | Free choice | Individual | Nature | Space | Time |