This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Death is the radical refutation of man’s power and a stark reminder of the necessity to relate to a meaning which lies beyond the dimension of human time. Humanity without death would be arrogance without end. Nobility has its root in humanity, and humanity derived much of its power from the thought of death.
Arrogance | Death | Humanity | Man | Meaning | Necessity | Nobility | Power | Thought | Time | Thought |
Kenneth Hanson, aka Ken Hanson
Opulence breeds complacency. The more things we have all around us, the less individual meaning any of them has.
Complacency | Individual | Meaning |
A sense of purpose and fulfillment is the single strongest issue flowing out of the quest for meaning… The end of the quest for meaning is the beginning of the journey of faith. Indeed, nothing better illuminates the entire journey of life and faith, and in particular the special challenge of finishing them well, than the issue of purpose.
Beginning | Better | Challenge | Faith | Fulfillment | Journey | Life | Life | Meaning | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Whereas Truth is complete and unchanging, on the contrary, man’s understanding and capacity for comprehension significantly advances and changes in all areas of knowledge. With it, significance and meaning become contextualized so that, although truth does not change, man’s understanding of it certainly does.
Capacity | Change | Knowledge | Man | Meaning | Truth | Understanding |
Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
Human existence has no such simple and direct meaning or goodness as the humanistic American dream... A comfortable chair, a hi-fi set, a pwoerful car, the protection of a deoderant, a college romance and a paying job, cannot even in combination provide meaning for our life.
Nothing in nature is isolated. Nothing is without reference to something else. Nothing achieves meaning apart from that which neighbors it.
To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own.
Bible | Meaning | Space | Time | Understand |
The strong, manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means restraining one’s inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety, love, fear, grief, and hate; and if a man does not give way to these, he can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might be, but I have long known and practiced patience.
Anger | Anxiety | Anxiety | Emotions | Fear | Grief | Hate | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Means | Patience | Understand |
What the world needs is a sense of ultimate embarrassment. Modern man has the power and the wealth to overcome poverty and disease, but he has no wisdom to overcome suspicion. We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls. We are better than our assertions, more intricate, more profound than our theories maintain.
Better | Disease | Existence | Goals | Man | Meaning | Poverty | Power | Sense | Suspicion | Theories | Wealth | Wisdom | World | Guilty |
The divine in the creation is only adequately represented when the whole of the time-process is gathered up into its final meaning and purpose, when, in fact, the mode of becoming is united with the mode of being. This I conceive to be the eternal world – not a world of immobility in contrast with a world of change, but a world in which the antinomy of becoming and being, of motion and rest, is transcended.
Change | Contrast | Eternal | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Rest | Time | World |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
The serious problems in life… are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seems not to lie in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.
The focus on themes in the lives of the elderly allows us to conceive of aging as continual creation of the self through the ongoing interpretation of past experience, structural factors, values, and current context…. Identity is built around themes, without regard to time, as past experiences are symbolically connected with one another to have meaning for a particular individual.
Experience | Focus | Individual | Meaning | Past | Regard | Self | Time |
The construction of a coherent, unified sense of self is an ongoing process. We have seen how old people express an identity through themes which are rooted in personal experience, particular structural factors, and a constellation of value orientations. Themes integrate these three sources of meaning as they structure the account of a life, express what is salient to the individual, and define a continuous and creative self.
Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Self | Sense | Old | Value |