This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.
Art | Cost | History | Human nature | Law | Mission | Nations | Nature | Need | Time | Work | Art |
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
Belief | Courage | Eternal | Light | Means | Nature | Need | Trust | Wisdom | World |
Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
This man is the bee's knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.
We often believe we are constant under misfortunes when we are only dejected; and we suffer then without daring to look on them, like cowards who allow themselves to be killed through fear of defending themselves.
We need not be much concerned about those faults which we have the courage to own.
Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
Need |
When you recognize the nature of mind, fabrication and effort are naturally freed.
Effort | Meditation | Need |
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
As Yin and Yang are not of the same nature, so man and woman have different characteristics. The distinctive quality of the Yang is rigidity; the function of the Yin is yielding. Man is honored for strength; a woman is beautiful on account of her gentleness. Hence there arose the common saying: "A man though born like a wolf may, it is feared, become a weak monstrosity; a woman though born like a mouse may, it is feared, become a tiger."
Appearance | Need | Virtue | Virtue | Woman | Words | Work |
For myself, I do not need to look in terms of survival after death. I feel myself to be a part of the known properties of the earth's family, and that is enough. One day, the breath I have been privileged to use will become again a part of the earth's family being. . . . If there is another place to catch up with the "breath," I hope it will be as challenging as it has been here; but if it does not exist, it is enough that I have lived.
Run as hard as a wild beast if you will, but you won't get any reward greater than that destined for you.
I am happy that in an age of technology there are those who are giving modern interpretation to the dream world which contains the key to the development of the evolution of the race. The dream world, and the world of deep feeling which is interpreted by symbols, relate to us the ancient races, for the dreams of ancient man and modern man are given in the same symbolic language.
Through the years of my trance communications and research, two control personalities... have always been identified with my work, and they have never ceased to maintain their independent and separate selves. It is interesting to note that they have always welcomed every form of scientific investigation into the nature of their own being and the mechanisms of my supernormal functioning; but up to the present any efforts to dislodge them or to reduce them to aspects of my own consciousness have led to no change in their attitude, position, or state of being. The control personalities still maintain the roles they have always played in relation to me, since my trance work began. I have reached a point in my development where I can live in harmony with myself and at peace with those personalities, for I am now able to regard them as the finer aspects of my true self. Whatever their origin may be, I do not, at present, have at my command the means of knowing; but for the time being, I am content to accept the controls as aspects of a constructive principle upon which my entire life has been built.
Gratitude | Heart | Individual | Love | Need | People | Position | Praise | Responsibility | Will | Work | Afraid | Leadership |