This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
God is not a thing, it is an attitude, an attitude of celebration and festivity. Drop sadness. He is so close by; dance! Drop long faces, it is sacrilege — because He is so close by. Forget your childish miseries and worries; He is so close by. Don’t go on brooding about immaterial things; He is so close by. Allow Him to hold your hand. He has been waiting for you for long. As your silence grows; your friendliness, your love grows; your life becomes a moment-to-moment dance, a joy, a celebration.
Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld
The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man.
Ego | Ends | Fame | Impulse | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Phenomena | Soul | Struggle | Success | Wants | Work |
A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background. This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.
Absurd | Consequences | Principles | Theories |
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Nothing |
When you choose your attitude toward life, you can affect reality by making it better for you… When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too… Words are life set down on paper… Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end… You can't avoid pain, but you can choose to overcome it… You are what you believe yourself to be… You are your own best friend. Never ever, put yourself down.
Better | Joy | Life | Life | Need | Reality | Sadness | Tears | Words |
Percy W. Bridgman, fully Percy Williams Bridgman
The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration. When he stops to think, he does recognize, however, that the whole atmosphere of the world in which he lives is tinged by science, as is shown most immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little deeper thinking shows him that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire mental outlook of modern civilised man on the world about him.
People with AIDS Coalition NULL
The People With AIDS (PWA) Self-Empowerment Movement is a social movement by those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS which grew out of San Francisco in the early 1980s. The PWA Self-Empowerment Movement believes that those diagnosed as having AIDS should "take charge of their own life, illness, and care, and to minimize dependence on others". The attitude that exists throughout the movement is that one should not assume that their life is over and will end soon solely because they have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Although most of the earliest organizers have died, and organizations dissolved or reconfigured into AIDS service organizations (ASOs) the self-empowerment and self-determination aspects of the movement continue. Possibly the best known example of a continuing PWA group is AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT-UP), which has chapters around the world and has had great success bringing attention to and change regarding issues concerning PWAs. PWA is also used simply to mean "person with HIV/AIDS", regardless of whether that person is associated with the PWA Self-Empowerment Movement. [from wikipedia]
Attention | Change | Dependence | Example | Life | Life | People | Power | Self-determination | Service | Success | Will | World |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Any system of sensate truth and reality implies a denial of, or an utterly indifferent attitude toward, any supersensory reality or value. By definition, supersensory reality is nonexistent or, if it exists, is unknowable to us and therefore equivalent to the nonexistent. Being unknowable, it is irrelevant and devoid of interest (Kantian criticism, agnosticism, positivism, etc.). Hence it follows that the sensory cultures regard investigations of the nature of God and supersensory phenomena as superstitious or fruitless speculation. Theology and religion, as a body of revealed truth, are at best tolerated, just as many hobbies are tolerated; or are given mere lip service; or are transformed into a kind of scientific theology.
Body | God | Nature | Phenomena | Reality | Regard | System | Theology | Truth | God |
Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.
Cause | Justice | Literature | Need | People | Present | Principles | Old | Think |
Whatever the child's initial reaction, though, the point to notice is that we eat animal flesh long before we are capable of understanding that what we are eating is the dead body of an animal. Thus we never make a conscious, informed decision, free from the bias that accompanies any long-established habit, reinforced by all the pressures of social conformity to eat animal flesh. At the same time, children have a natural love of animals, and our society encourages them to be affectionate toward animals such as dogs and cats and toward cuddly, stuffed animals. These facts help to explain that most distinctive characteristic of the attitudes of children in our society to animals - namely, that rather than having one unified attitude to animals, the child has two conflicting attitudes that coexists, carefully segregated so that the inherent contradiction between them rarely causes trouble.
Body | Children | Conformity | Contradiction | Love | Society | Understanding | Society | Child |
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
The attitude of the manners should adorn knowledge and smooth the path in the association.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Besides its precious work, which makes the eye superior to every other organ of the body, it is the expression of the beauty of body, mind and soul. Sufis, therefore, symbolize the eye by a cup of wine. Through the eyes, the secret hidden in man's heart is reflected into the heart of another. However much a person may try to conceal his secret, yet the reader can read it in his eyes, and can read there his pleasure, his displeasure, his joy, and his sorrow. A seer can see still farther. The seer can see the actual condition of man's soul through his eyes, his grade of evolution, his attitude in life, his outlook on life, and his condition, both hidden and manifest. Besides, to the passive soul of a disciple, knowledge, ecstasy, spiritual joy, and divine peace, all are given through the glance. One sees in everyday life that a person who is laughing in his mind with his lips closed can express his laughter through his glance, and the one who receives the glance at once catches the infectious mirth. Often the same happens through looking in the eyes of the sorrowful, in a moment one becomes filled with depression. And those whose secret is God, whose contemplation is the perfection of beauty, whose joy is endless in the realization of everlasting life, and from whose heart the spring of love is ever flowing, it is most appropriate that their glance should be called, symbolically, the Bowl of Saki, the Bowl of the Wine-Giver.
Beauty | Contemplation | Heart | Joy | Laughter | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Perfection | Soul | Beauty | Contemplation |
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
The truth is like a piano: the notes may be high or low, one may strike a Cor an E, but they are all notes. So the difference between ideas is like thatbetween notes, and it is the same in daily life with the right and the wrong attitude. If we have the wrong attitude all things are right. The man whomistrusts himself will mistrust his best friend; the man who trusts himself will trust everyone.
Ideas | Life | Life | Man | Mistrust | Right | Trust | Truth | Will | Wrong |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Finally, true freedom is not advanced in the per missive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace. There are many examples of this mistaken idea of freedom, such as the elimination of human life by legalized or generally accepted abortion.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
True compassion leads to sharing another’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.
Compassion | Freedom | Kill | People | Society | Suffering | Society |
The childish and outgrown absurdities, the moral baseness in the idea of God interwoven (shaped on the pattern of an Eastern despot) with the memories of Christ’s beautiful life and teaching and death into a system. . . . [A]nd that demolition will happen now gently and quickly—now that there is once more a kindred human soul to Christ’s on the earth—one filled with the same radiant glowing consciousness (it is a consciousness, not a belief) of the divine and immortal nature of the human soul—the same fearless, trusting, loving attitude towards God, as of a son, the same actual close embracing shape in what new and rich developments through the lips of this Poet! . . . Now Christianity will go—and Christ be better understood and loved than He has been since those early times when His great personal influence yet vibrated in the world, and the darkness of His expounders had not begun to work adversely to the growing lights of succeeding times.
Baseness | Better | Consciousness | Darkness | Death | God | Influence | Life | Life | Soul | Will | Work | God |
Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL
Bodily pain affects man as a whole down to the deepest layers of his moral being. It forces him to face again the fundamental questions of his fate, of his attitude toward God and fellow man, of his individual and collective responsibility and of the sense of his pilgrimage on earth.
God | Individual | Man | Pain | Responsibility | Sense | God |