This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John-Roger & Peter McWilliams NULL
Death - the ultimate deadline. The first step in seeing death as an ally of accomplishment is to remove the childhood fears we have concerning death... Death encourages action... Death encourages risk.
Accomplishment | Childhood | Death |
They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
Within the scientific skeleton of truth, religious meaning attempts to flourish, often by denying the scientific framework itself — rather like sawing off the branch where you cheerily perch. The disgust is mutual because modern science gleefully denies virtually all the basic tenets of religion in general. According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus. Whether the religious claims are more literal (Moses parting the Red Sea) or more mystical (religion invovlves direct spiritual experience) modern science denies them all, simply because there is no credible empirical evidence for any of them.
Childhood | Evidence | Meaning | Mystical | Reality | Religion | Science | Tenets | Parting |
Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.
Childhood | Future | Good | Industry | Life | Life | Poverty | Right | Teach |
Old ages lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.
We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child's spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.
Age | Beginning | Childhood | Consequences | Dawn | Education | Humanity | Life | Life | Child |
Mendele Mokher Sforim or Sfarim, pseudonymn of Shalom Jacob Abramowitsch
Children without a childhood are tragic.
Inexperience is a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only; we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is; we marry without knowing what it is to be married; and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: The old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.
Childhood | Children | Experience | Knowing | Life | Life | Time | World | Youth | Youth | Old |
Behind the repudiation of the ceremonial by the reformers lay a radically different conceptual world, a world in which text was everything, sign nothing... would take centuries for the Church of England to acknowledge and try to recover what it had lost... its place text ('the word') became in its own way a different sort of worshipped image, one which sometimes excluded feeling and the deep movements of the unconscious mind which ritual had faithfully fed. It is not, of course, that poetry or powerful preaching cannot express feeling, but that part of our human consciousness is pre-literate, both historically and in our personal childhood experience, and the whole of our experience cannot necessarily be captured by words. It may be important to lay wordless experiences alongside the wordy ones, as in music, colour, form, movement and smell.
Childhood | Church | Consciousness | Experience | Important | Mind | Poetry | World |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
She will never learn the most necessary, most difficult and principal thing in music, that is time, because from childhood she has designedly cultivated the habit of ignoring the beat.
From childhood I was compelled to concentrate attention upon myself. This caused me much suffering, but to my present view, it was a blessing in disguise for it has taught me to appreciate the inestimable value of introspection in the preservation of life, as well as a means of achievement. The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves. The premature death of millions is primarily traceable to this cause. Even among those who exercise care, it is a common mistake to avoid imaginary, and ignore the real dangers. And what is true of an individual also applies, more or less, to a people as a whole.
Attention | Childhood | Consciousness | Contemplation | Death | Disguise | Existence | Individual | Knowledge | Means | Mistake | Occupation | People | Present | World | Contemplation | Value |
Oswald Spengler, fully Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler
A culture is born when a great soul awakens, stands out of the mental state of perpetual childhood primary human form of the formless end, limit output and decay of the infinite and duration. It grows on the ground of a landscape exactly definable, which it remains bound as a plant. A culture dies when the soul has made the entire amount of its ability, in the form of peoples, languages, religious doctrines, arts, sciences, and thus it returns to the primary psychic state.
Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
Death is a silent, peaceful genius, who rocks our second childhood to sleep in the cradle of the coffin.
Patrick Blackett, bully Baron Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett
People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland.... An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given.
Childhood | Happy | Imagination | World | Old |
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.
Forgetting is painful… Forgive but do not forget, or you will be hurt again. Forgiving changes the perspectives. Forgetting loses the lesson… Fortunate are those who take the first steps… Facing the difficulties, I can choose either to be a poor victim or a great adventurer… Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.
Childhood | Experience | Joy | Knowing | People | Will | Forgive | Victim |
In the dimension of time, consciousness is experienced as the eternal present with a strong element of teleology: It is the future that pulls rather than the past that pushes. Some traditional views of man interpret the present as determined by the past. Specifically, these views hold that present events or problems are the workings out of early programing. Maturity then becomes the resolution of childhood conflicts.... An alternative interpretation of the situation is to seek ways to outgrow, i.e., genuinely overcome, a problem.... Genuine growth is the experience of being pulled or attracted by a goal in the future (Aristotle's final cause or telos), not that of being pushed into action (Aristotle's efficient cause or aitia). And in directing our gaze to the future, we utilize whatever material from the past we deem appropriate, including the use of the past to interfere with the future. Under this analysis, the past becomes almost irrelevant in the experience and conception of the present. Men like Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle and Bertrand Russell were able to maintain joy, growth, and vigor in old age because the future and not the past was experienced as determining their present.
Action | Age | Cause | Childhood | Consciousness | Eternal | Events | Experience | Future | Growth | Man | Old age | Past | Present | Problems | Resolution | Old |
Philippine Proverbs, aka Philipino, Filipino, Ilocano and Tagalog Proverbs, Salawikain or Sawikain
What one learns in childhood he carries into adulthood.
Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am, that is, with the congenital quality (or weakness) which ever since my childhood has caused my spiritual life to be completely dominated by a sort of profound 'feeling' for the organic realness of the World. At first it was an ill-defined feeling in my mind and heart, but as the years have gone by it has gradually become a precise, compelling sense of the Universe's general convergence upon itself; a convergence which coincides with, and culminates at its zenith in, him in quo omina constant, and whom the Society has taught me to love.
Childhood | Life | Life | Mind | Organic | Sense | Society | Society |