This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is so hard to break, it is because the two sexes are each the victim at once of the other and of itself. Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither. But the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each camp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy; woman is pursuing a dream of submission, man a dream of identification. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way; what man and woman loathe in each other is the shattering frustration of each one's own bad faith and baseness.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.
Absolute | Abstract | Childhood | Contempt | Desire | Fighting | Ideas | Nothing | Order | Paradise | Reality | Suffering | World |
Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL
All the Saints have understood this, and more especially perhaps those who have enlightened the world with the luminous teaching of the Gospel. Was it not from prayer that Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa and so many other friends of God drew that wondrous science which enraptures the greatest intellects?
Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola
The shortest, yea, the only way to reach sanctity, is to conceive a horror for all that the world loves and values.
As you watch your ill will dispassionately, you’ll discover that, like all feelings, this negative emotion is not as solid as it first appears. Like a wave that rises from the ocean one minute and sinks back into it the next, the ill will rises in your heart, lasts for a short while, and then disappears again. A similar wave may rise up and take its place, but it too will inevitably subside. If you can stand back and simply observe this process (which is similar to the breath-awareness technique that we explain in Chapter 7), your negative feelings will eventually exhaust themselves.
Compassion | Experience | Good | Heart | Mind | Qualities | Suffering |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
There were a Te Deum, clouds of incense, endless volleys of musketry and artillery; the peasants were frantic with joy and piety. Such a day undoes the work of a hundred numbers of the Jacobin papers.
Many similarities of basic design among animal phyla, once so confidently attributed to convergence, and viewed as testimony to the power of natural selection to craft exquisite adaptation, demand the opposite interpretation that Mayr labeled as inconceivable: the similar features arehomologies, or products of the same genes, inherited from a common ancestor and never altered enough by subsequent evolution to erase their comparable structure and function. The similarities record the constraining power of conserved history, not the architectural skills of natural selection independently pursuing an optimal design in separate lineages. Vertebrates are, in a certain sense, true brothers (or homologs) - not mere analogs - of worms and insects.
To get a better idea of how mindful awareness (often called simply mindfulness) operates, consider the popular Buddhist metaphor of the forest pool. If wind and rain constantly batter the pool, the water will tend to be agitated and cloudy with sediment and organic debris, and you won’t be able to see all the way down to the bottom. But you can’t calm the pool by manipulating the water. Any attempts to do so will merely cause more agitation and add to the problem. The only way to clear the water is to sit patiently, watching the pool, and wait for the sediment to settle by itself.
There is nothing to do but be.
Enough | Forgiveness | Heart | Love | Nothing | Suffering | Forgiveness |
Examining who am I is like beginning to go to the movies just to see how the movie is made. As we first sit down in the dark theater we find that we are relating to the objects of the melodrama, the motion on the screen. We pay attention to the story line, which we notice is like the contents of the mind, allowing it to unfold as it will without judgment or the least interference. As we focus our attention on the process, we begin to see that frames that constitute film are like separate thoughts; then we begin to recognize the process buy which the images are produced, and it breaks our enthrallment with the story line. We notice that ll the activity is just a projection on a blank screen. That all these figures dancing before us are an illusion produced by light passing through various densities on the film. We see the film is like our conditioning, a repetitious imprint of images gone by. We see that the whole melodrama is a passing show of motion and change ... We discover that all we imagined ourselves to be — all our becoming, our memory, all the contents of mind — is just old film running off. The projectionist has died. Who am I? can't be answered. We cannot know the truth. We can only be it. Constantly living life in the past tense, rummaging through consciousness to decide who and what we are, the truth is obscured. The truth cannot be discovered in the contents of the mind. Only the untruth of false identification can be uncovered. Going beyond the false, the truth is revealed.
Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence.
Anger | Discovery | Experience | Grief | Heart | Pain | Suffering | Thought | Discovery | Child | Thought |
Nothing that has ever been thought and said with a clear mind and pure ethical strength is totally in vain; even if it comes from a weak hand and is imperfectly formed, it inspires the ethical spirit to constantly renewed creation.
Defeat | Heart | Superiority |
In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
Day | Experience | Insight | Reason | Suffering | Understanding |
Technology has destroyed interrelations in the human community... We are living among dispirited and agonized teenagers who can't find any hope.
Be aware of the contact between your feet and the Earth. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet. We have caused a lot of damage to the Earth. Now it is time for us to take good care of her. We bring our peace and calm to the surface of the Earth and share the lesson of love. We walk in that spirit.
Body | Consciousness | Diet | Family | Future | Good | Joy | Society | Suffering | Will | Work | Society | Understand |
Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice... No one can prevent you from being aware of each step you take or each breath in and breath out.
We who have touched war have a duty to bring the truth about war to those who have not had a direct experience of it. We are the light at the tip of the candle. It is really hot, but it has the power of shining and illuminating. If we practice mindfulness, we will know how to look deeply into the nature of war and, with our insight, wake people up so that together we can avoid repeating the same horrors again and again.
When our heart is filled with loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, its capacity becomes boundless, immeasurable. With such a vast heart, immense as the wide-open sea, suffering cannot overpower us, just as a small handful of salt cannot make a great river salty.
The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and the now. But the question is whether you are available to the kingdom. Our practice is to make ourselves ready for the kingdom so that it can manifest in the here and the now. You don't need to die in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, you have to be truly alive in order to do so.