This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.
Amelia Earhart, fully Amelia Mary Earhart
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.
Change | Control | Decision | Life | Life | Rest | Reward | Tenacity |
Our hesitation before such a colossal thought will perhaps be diminished by the recollection... that the ultimate dreamer of the vast life-dream is finally, in a certain sense, but one, namely the Will to Live, and that the multiplicity of appearances follows from the conditioning effects of time and space [the morphogenetic field whereby the Will to Live assumes forms]. It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything links and accords with everything else.
Life | Life | Sense | Space | Thought | Time | Will | Thought |
Many have declared the ultimate truth openly: that only the self is, that you are nothing other than the Self, that the universe is a mere manifestation of the Self, without inherent reality, existing only in the Self. This can be understood by the analogy of a dream. The whole dream-world with all its people and events exist only in the mind of the dreamer. Its creation or emergence takes nothing away from him, and its dissolution or reabsorption adds nothing to him; he remains the same before, during, and after. God, the conscious Dreamer of the cosmic dream, is the Self, and no person in the dream has any reality apart from the Self of which he is an expression. By discarding the illusion of otherness, you can realize that identity with the Self which always was, is, and will be, beyond the conditions of life and time. Then, since you are One with the Dreamer, the whole universe, including your life and all others, is your dream and none of the events in it have more than a dream reality. You are set free from hope and desire, fear and frustration, and established in the unchanging Bliss of Pure Being.
Desire | Events | Fear | God | Hope | Illusion | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | People | Reality | Self | Time | Truth | Universe | Will | World |
[Man’s] self-conscious existence as man forces on him a choice of uses for his faculties... This choice is what is called free will. Free will, therefore, not only a prerogative but an obligation for man. Free will thus understood, has nothing to do with destiny. It is a power which man is compelled by his own nature to use, whether the use he makes of it is predestined or not... the responsibility of deciding rests with me just the same whether the outcome is predetermined or not. If it is predetermined, it is my own past habit-forming and character-forming decisions in this and previous lifetimes which have predetermined it; and this decision in its turn will help to condition my mind, thus determining future ones.
Character | Choice | Decision | Destiny | Existence | Free will | Future | Habit | Man | Mind | Nature | Nothing | Obligation | Past | Power | Responsibility | Self | Will |
It is certain that the soul is either mortal or immortal. The decision of this question must make a total difference in the principles of morals. Yet philosophers have arranged their moral system entirely independent of this. What an extraordinary blindness!
Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.
Better | Decision | Decisiveness | Men |
Deliberate with caution, but act with decision (and promptness); and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.
Caution | Decision | Firmness | Promptness |
It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves.
Decision | Excellence | Man | Excellence |
Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken ismade whole again, what is soiled is made clean.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Day |
George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
Men |
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotized by reality.