This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.
Today no matter where I'm going, no matter what I'm doing, no matter who I'm doing it with, it is my dominant intent to look for and find things that feel good when I see them, when I hear them, when I smell them, when I taste them, when I touch them.
Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.
Habit |
The whole tribe of philosophers have fallen into the fame error with Locke. Some of them, who pretend that every perception leaves an image in the mind, in the same manner almost as a seal leaves its impression behind it, are not to be excepted: for what is the image of a perception, which is not the perception itself? The mistake is owing to this, that for want of having sufficiently considered the matter, they have mistaken, for the very perception of the object, some circumstances, or some general idea, which revive themselves in its stead. To avoid such mistakes, I shall here distinguish the different perceptions we are capable of feeling, and examine them each in their proper order.
It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.
Memory, as we have seen, consists only in the power of reviving the signs of our ideas, or the circumstances that attended them; a power which never takes place, except when by the analogy of the signs we have chosen, and by the order we have settled between our ideas, the objects which we want to revive are connected with some of our present wants.
Instead of asking, “Why does this happen Why do I feel left in the lurch” we can ask “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God’s strong name is our help’”
Competence | God | Growth | Habit | Knowing | Knowledge | Love | People | Understanding | God |
Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, donÂ’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
With regard to natural cries, this man shall form them, as soon as he feels the passions to which they belong. However they will not be signs in respect to him the first time; because instead of reviving .his perceptions, they will as yet be no more than consequences of those perceptions.
It is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts.
But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you — and other people — any trouble.
The aversion has less of flexibility that the desire, c ' is a strength defensive, a resistance that protects the individual.
We learn to live not by our feelings about God but by the facts about God. If I break my leg I do not become less a person. My wife and children do not reject me. Neither when my faith fractures or my feelings bruise does God cast me off and reject me.
Words |
Let us consider man the first moment of his existence; his mind immediately feels different sensations; such as light, colors, pain, pleasure, motion, rest: these arc his first thoughts.
When words were become the most natural signs of our ideas, the necessity of arranging them in an order so contrary to that which at present prevails, was no longer the fame. And yet they continued to do it, because the character of languages, having been framed from this necessity, did not permit any change. to be made in this custom; neither did they begin to draw near to our manner of conceiving, till after a long succession of idioms.
Habit | Imagination | Regard |
You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in spiritual direction. Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters.