This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If ignorance and passions are foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
Ignorance | Indifference | Morality |
Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
Time is never more misspent than while we declaim against the want of it; all our actions are then tinctured with peevishness. The yoke of life is certainly the least oppressive when we carry it with good-humor; and in the shades of rural retirement, when we have once acquired a resolution to pass our hours with economy sorrowful lamentations on the subject of time misspent and business neglected never torture the mind.
Business | Good | Humor | Life | Life | Mind | Resolution | Retirement | Time | Torture | Wisdom | Business |
The opportunity offered by a shrinking economy to experience simple pleasures might be one of God’s better gifts to this generation.
Better | Experience | God | Opportunity |
Bob Edwards, fully Robert Alan "Bob" Edwards
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
Could it be that liberation, not knowledge, is the true end purpose of human life and even its meaning? And might this liberation be achieved through non-rational means: power, sexuality, revolution, resignation, creativity, compassion, or solidarity? If this predicament is not so much ignorance (of something) as bondage (to something), what must we be liberated from, and what are we therefore liberated for?
Compassion | Creativity | Ignorance | Knowledge | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Resignation | Revolution |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Much that we hug today as knowledge is ignorance pure and simple… It makes the mind wander and even reduces it to a vacuity.
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
There is nothing more dangerous than ignorance being practiced.
Even while we mourn the death of a loved one, there is room in our hearts for thankfulness for that life… Sober reflection can also lead us to a more sympathetic appreciation of the vital role death plays in the economy of life. Life’s significant and zest issue from our awareness of its transiency, its “fragile contingency.” The urge to create, the passion to perfect, the will to heal and cure – all the noblest of human enterprises grow in the soil of human mortality.
Appreciation | Awareness | Death | Life | Life | Mourn | Passion | Reflection | Thankfulness | Will | Appreciation | Awareness |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
In Reality, nothing requires explanation. Nothing is caused by anything else. Existence requires no explanation nor does it have any dependence on any other state or quality. This understanding is clarified by the realization that nothing in and of itself has any `meaning’. Therefore, neither does it have `purpose’. Everything is already complete and merely self-existent as its own self-identity.
Dependence | Existence | Meaning | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Self | Self-identity | Understanding |
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative [or creation] there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too... Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.
Action | Chance | Grace | Ideas | Ignorance | Initiative | Magic | Power | Providence | Truth | Think |
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 |