This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Success should be measured by the yardstick of happiness; by your ability to remain in peaceful harmony with cosmic laws.
Well, one of the things we’ve done at my institute is we’ve created a website called wiserearth.org precisely to create, in a sense, an information commons for this unnamed movement that is also the fastest-growing movement in the world, and where you can put in your organization profiles, events and so forth, and a website, Democracy Now! or any other, can sit right on top of the data and pull it up, so that we’re trying to create more or less something that feeds these NGOs and the ability for them to recognize, contact, connect and collaborate or coalesce in different ways. That is missing right now.
Ability | Democracy | Events | Organization | Right |
Bear Bryant, fully Paul William "Bear" Bryant
Players can be divided, roughly, into four types. Those who have ability and know it, those who have it and don't know it, those who don't have it and know it, and those who don't have it but don't know it.
Ability |
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves.
Ability | Blame | Compassion | Heart | Pain | Rage | Words | Guilty |
The fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other... Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been throughout the history of this struggle. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people's cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.
Ability | Cause | Confidence | Contradiction | Desire | Generosity | History | Indispensable | Justify | Order | People | Risk | Struggle | Trust |
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bhodichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love… Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we're arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.
Ability | Anxiety | Anxiety | Birth | Heart | Mind | Sadness | Teach | Tenderness |
Bear Bryant, fully Paul William "Bear" Bryant
I can reach a kid who doesn’t have any ability as long as he doesn’t know it.
Ability |
We are all growing and changing shape, we notice certain weaknesses that need to be corrected, we don't always choose the best solutions, but we carry on regardless, trying to remain upright and decent, in order to do honor not to the walls or the doors or the windows, but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venerate what is dearest and most important to us… A man's dignity isn't measured by the people he has around him when he's at the peak of his success, but by his ability not to forget those who helped him when his need was greatest… A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth. If I have to fall, may it be from a high place… A life without a cause is a life without effect.
Ability | Cause | Dignity | Honor | Important | Life | Life | Need | Order | People | Space | Worship |
Free again, but it's just a feeling; freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit yourself to what is best for you… Freedom continues to be the thing I prize most in the world. Of course, this has led me to drink wines I did not like, to do things I should not have done and which I will not do again; it has left scars on my body and on my soul, it has meant hurting certain people, although I have since asked their forgiveness, when I realized that I could do absolutely anything except force another person to follow me in my madness, in my lust for life. I don’t regret the painful times; I bear my scars like medals. I know that freedom has a high price, as high as that of slavery; the only difference is that you pay with pleasure and a smile, even when that smile is dimmed by tears… Freedom has a high price, as high as that of slavery; the only difference is that you pay with pleasure and a smile, even when that smile is dimmed with tears… Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit myself to - what is best for me… Absolute freedom does not exist: there is only the freedom to choose something from that moment onwards to feel bound by its own decision.
Ability | Absence | Absolute | Body | Force | Freedom | Lust | Pleasure | Regret | Smile | Will |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The success and ultimately the survival of every business, large or small, depends in the last analysis on its ability to develop people. This ability is not measured by any of our conventional yardsticks of economic success; yet, is the final measurement.
Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
We can consciously end our life almost anytime we choose. This ability is an endowment, like laughing and blushing, given to no other animal... in any given moment, by not exercising the option of suicide, we are choosing to live.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work--still abysmally low--will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.
Ability | Challenge | Danger | Dignity | Knowledge | Majority | Service | Society | Will | Society | Danger |
Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them.
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
The difference between a healthy group or organization and an unhealthy one lies in its members’ awareness and ability to acknowledge their felt needs to conform.
Ability | Awareness | Organization | Awareness |
Legally, the doctor should not [kill the infant], and in this respect the law reflects the sanctity of life view. Yet people who would say this about the infant do not object to the killing of nonhuman animals. How can they justify their different judgments? Adult chimpanzees, dogs, pigs, and members of many other species far surpass the brain-damaged infant in their ability to relate to others, act independently, be self-aware, and any other capacity that could reasonably be said to give value to life. The only thing that distinguishes the infant from the animal, in the eyes of those who claim it has a "right to life," is that it is, biologically, a member of the species Homo sapiens...But to use this difference as the basis for granting a right to life to the infant and not to the other animals is, of course, pure speciesism. It is exactly the kind of arbitrary difference that the most crude and overt kind of racist uses in attempting to justify racial discrimination.
Ability | Capacity | Justify | Law | Life | Life | Object | People | Respect | Right | Respect | Value |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
There is a big difference between having a mission statement and being truly mission-based. To be truly mission-based means that key decisions can be referred back to the mission -- our reason for being. It means that people can and should object to management edicts that they do not see as connected to the mission...In most organizations, no one would dream of challenging a management decision on the grounds that it does not serve the mission. In other words, most organizations serve those in power rather than a mission. [The mission] says rather, that the source of legitimate power in the organization is its guiding ideas...The cornerstone of a truly democratic system of governance is not voting or any other particular mechanism. It is the belief that power ultimately flows from ideas, not people. To be truly mission-based is to be democratic in this way, to make the mission more important than the boss, something that not too many corporations have yet demonstrated an ability to do.
Ability | Belief | Decision | Important | Means | Mission | Object | Organization | People | Power | Reason | System |
Authentic leaders have absorbed the fundamental fact of existence -- that you can't get around life's inherent contradictions. The leadership mind is spacious. It has ample room for the ambiguities of the world, for conflicting feelings, and for contradictory ideas. I believe that the central leadership attribute is the ability to manage polarity.
Ability | Existence | Mind | Leadership |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.