This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Hillel taught: “A person who is [too] shy [to ask questions] will never learn, and a teacher who is too strict cannot teach . . . and in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
There is no greater teacher of morals than love itself, for the first lessonthat one learns from love is: I am not, you are….When the thought of self is removed then every action, every deed that one performs in life,becomes a virtue.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Be polite to all. Be prejudiced against no one. Bear no malice against your worst enemy. Blessed are they who make willing sacrifices in kindness. Consider your responsibility sacred. Do not look down upon the one who looks up to you. Do nothing which will make your conscience feel guilty. Extend your help willingly to those in need. Guard the secrets of friends as your most sacred trust. Influence no one to do wrong. Judge not another by your own law. Prove trustworthy in all your dealings.
Conscience | Looks | Malice | Nothing | Responsibility | Sacred | Will | Friends |
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Rabban Gamaliel said: “Provide yourself with a teacher and remove yourself from doubt, and do not accustom yourself to give tithes by estimation.”
Teacher |
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Joshua ben Perachyah said: “Provide for yourself a teacher and get yourself a friend; and judge every man towards merit.”
I contemplate the sort of friend, the sort of man I am now without. He completed his sixty-seventh year, a reasonable age for the sturdiest of us; I acknowledge that. He escaped from an interminable illness; I acknowledge that. He died with his dear ones surviving him, and at a time of prosperity for the state, which was dearer to him than all else; that too I acknowledge. Yet I lament his death as though he were young and in glowing health. I lament it—you can consider me a weakling in this—on my own account, for I have lost the witness, guardian and teacher of my life.
Who looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.
Beauty | Birth | Looks | Love | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Beauty |
The standards and accountability movement has grown dramatically over the last decade. The No Child Left Behind Act became law, and it has laid bare the problems in many of our poorest, worst-performing schools. We can no longer say that we didn't know that these schools were failing some of our most vulnerable kids. To improve the quality of education, we need to improve instruction in the classroom. Nationwide, two million teachers will leave teaching over the next decade. NYC already loses 30% more math teachers and 22% more science teachers than it certifies every year. IN 2001, I proposed the National Teacher Corps, which brings teachers into the classroom, and a new initiative that would provide more schools with strong principals. Both became law.
Initiative | Need | Problems | Science | Will | Instruction | Child | Teacher |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
Everyone in yuppie-land — airports, for example — looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs ... Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad and objet through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from another vantage point, only an obstacle between some thirsty person and a glass of water.
Example | Individual | Looks | Self | Will | Wonder | Obstacle |
Deborah Tannen, fully Deborah Frances Tannen
The seeds of the Argument Culture can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea... up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because they're so busy trying to win the debate.
It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.
Aims | Existence | Experience | God | Individual | Looks | Nature | Order | Prison | Universe | Wants | World | God |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Looking back at the wake of my ship one day in 1917, I became interested in its beautiful white path. I said to myself, That path is white because of the different refractions of light by the bubbles of water-H20 (not H0). The bubbles are beautiful little spheres. I wonder how many bubbles I am looking at stretching miles astern. I began to make calculations of how many bubbles there were per cubic foot of water. I began to find that in calculating the ship's white wake I was dealing in quintillions to the fourth power times quintillions to the fourth power or some such fantastically absurd number of bubbles. And nature was making those bubbles in sublimely swift ease! Any time one looks carefully at a bubble, one is impressed with the beauty of its structure, its’ beautiful sphericity glinting with the colors of the spectrum. It is ephemeral-elegantly conceived, beautifully manufactured and readily broken. Inasmuch as the kind of mathematics I had learned of in school required the use of the XYZ coordinate system and the necessity of employing in calculating the spheres, I wondered, to how many decimal places does nature carry out before she decides the computation can't be concluded? Next I wondered, to how many arbitrary decimal places does nature carry out the transcendental irrational before she decides to say it's a bad job and call it off? If nature uses she has to do what we call fudging of her design which means improvising, compromisingly. I thought sympathetically of nature's having to make all those myriad frustrating decisions each time she made a bubble. I didn't see how she managed to formulate the wake of every ship while managing the rest of the universe if she had to make all those decisions. So I said to myself, I don't think nature uses. I think she has some other mathematical way of coordinating her undertakings.
Absurd | Beauty | Day | Design | Light | Little | Looks | Mathematics | Means | Nature | Necessity | Power | Rest | System | Thought | Time | Universe | Wonder | Beauty | Think | Thought |
Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."
THE lessons of fear which the child receives from its parents are intensified by the methods employed at the school in which he receives his education and life-training. We glory in the fact that we have made great strides in the science of education, that we are more practical in the choice of subjects for study, that we have a deeper insight into the soul of the child. And yet, in our method of imparting knowledge and in the relations between teacher and pupil, we can boast of but little progress. We still look upon the child as a more or less unwilling receptacle that must be stuffed with learning. The teacher is still a being to be feared, the school room still a prison house, and learning a punishment. Our system of education is still based on reward and punishment. A high mark is still the encouragement for zeal in study, while the backward student is haunted by the prospect of a low grade. The child, under present methods, prepares his lessons either in order to gain the reward of a high mark, or for fear of the contempt and humiliation that accompanies a low grade. In other words, he works not because of the intrinsic interest of his work but in the hope of reward or in the fear of punishment. The first motive breeds the harmful spirit of competition in the young mind.
Choice | Competition | Contempt | Education | Fear | Glory | Hope | Insight | Knowledge | Learning | Little | Method | Order | Parents | Present | Prison | Reward | Science | Soul | Spirit | System | Work | Zeal | Child | Teacher |
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
Life looks like a theater, where very bad people take the best places.
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
It is worthwhile too to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a boy's mind from effort.
R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth
What is Zen? Zen is looking at things with the eye of God, that is, becoming the thing's eyes so that it looks at itself with our eyes.