This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from causes to effects and from effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.
Determination | Mind | Necessity | Nothing | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of association.
Association | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much, says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.
Ideas | Language | Little | Man | Observation | Reflection | Sound | Thinking | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation.
Absolute | Acceptance | Age | Body | Choice | Coercion | Death | Enemy | Experience | Fear | Life | Life | Opportunity | People | Right | Sense | Soul | Thinking | Thought | Time | Understanding | Unique | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Compassion | Defiance | Despair | God | Harm | Love | Man | Passion | Strength | Thought | Wisdom | God | Thought |
So that, upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexion which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any ties between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected. And as we have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life. But there still remains one method of avoiding this conclusion, and one source which we have not yet examined.
Events | Life | Life | Meaning | Method | Nature | Power | Sense | Sentiment | Wisdom | Words |
Notwithstanding the empire of the imagination, there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other... These principles of association are reduced to three, viz. Resemblance... Contiguity... Causation... as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are only ties of our thought, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them.
Appearance | Association | Ideas | Imagination | Means | Mind | Principles | Thought | Universe | Wisdom | Association | Thought |
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Whatever you attach to the words I am is what you are claiming for yourself... Words are the lasers of human thought... Words, in fact, are random thoughts which have been brought together to become “coherent thought.”