This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Duane Elgin and Arnold Mitchell (1918-1985)
Proposed four consumption criteria for simple living. (1) Does what I own or buy promote activity, self-reliance, and involvement, or does it induce passivity and dependence? (2) Are my consumption patterns basically satisfying, or do I buy much that serves no real need? (3) How tied is my present job and lifestyle to installment payments, maintenance and repair costs, and the expectations of others? (4) Do I consider the impact of my consumption patterns on other people and on the Earth?
Dependence | Earth | Need | People | Present | Self | Self-reliance | Wisdom |
How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon
I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our ‘at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances.
Yakov Smirnoff, born Yakov Naumovich Pokhis
When Leo Tolstoy was an old man he was planting little apple trees. His neighbor laughed at him and called him a silly old man, because when the apples finally grew he wouldn’t be around to eat them. Tolstoy told him, “Yes, but other people will eat them and they will think of me.” It think that’s what we’re supposed to do: leave more than we’ve found, give more than we’ve received, love more than we’ve been loved.
Little | Love | Man | People | Will | Wisdom | Old | Think |
Teach the young people [a child] how to think, not what to think.
Booth Tarkington, born Newton Booth Tarkington
Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.
Don't let young people confide in you their aspirations; when they drop them, they will drop you.
Too many people do not card what happens as long as it does not happen to them.
Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.
Appreciation | Love | Music | People | Respect | Wisdom | Appreciation | Respect | Trouble |
Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
The white man’s civilization with its inhuman economic competition and rugged individualism has produced millions of physical and mental wrecks. It has produced enough vices to fill Dante’s hell. Nine-tenths of the people who reach forty are suffering from shattered nerves.
Civilization | Competition | Enough | Hell | Man | People | Suffering | Wisdom |
Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Usually people interested in spiritual development think in terms of the importance of mind, that mysterious, high and deep thing that we have decided to learn about. But strangely enough, the profound and the transcendental are to be found in the factory. It may not fill you with bliss to look at it, it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we have read about, but somehow reality is to be found there in the way in which we relate with everyday problems. If we relate to them in a simple, earthy way, we will work in a more balanced manner, and things will be dealt with properly.
Enough | Good | Mind | People | Problems | Reality | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Work | Learn | Think |
To love our neighbors as ourselves does not mean that we should love all people equally, for I do not have an equal love for all the modes of existence of myself. Nor does it mean that we should never make them suffer, for I do not refuse to make myself suffer. But we should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of it.
Existence | Love | People | Relationship | Universe | Wisdom |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
In times of revolution, people boast almost as much about the imaginary crimes they propose to commit as, in normal times, they do of the good intentions they pretend to entertain.
Good | People | Revolution | Wisdom |