This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Remember every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.
Excellence | Self | Work |
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle.
Work |
Carlos Castaneda, fully Carlos César Salvador Arana Castaneda
The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Work |
When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our souls fly open, and love steps forth to heal everything in sight.
Prayer is not a vain attempt to change God’s will: it is a filial desire to learn God’s will and share it. Prayer is not a substitute for work: it is the secret spring and indispensable ally of all true work – the clarifying of work’s goal, the purifying of its motives, and the renewing of its zeal.
Change | Desire | God | Indispensable | Motives | Prayer | Will | Work | Zeal | Learn |
The great moral reformers have usually found the greatest opposition not in the “immoral” and impulsive individual, but in the regularly constituted organs of social authority and law.
Authority | Individual | Law | Opposition |
A conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.
Belief | Experience | God | Mind | Order | Rationality | Work | World |
The great successful people of the world . . . think ahead and create their mental picture, and then go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit but steadily building--steadily building.
Eric D’Arcy, fully Joseph Eric D'Arcy
A person who holds for the moral authority of conscience will also hold for the individual’s freedom to follow his conscience without interference from the State.
Authority | Conscience | Freedom | Individual | Will |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built.
At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.
Behavior | Education | Ideas | Important | Indispensable | Money | Occupation | People | Style | Taste | Work | Think |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
The respect due the authority carries with it the taboo on questioning it.
I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.
Amusements | Attention | Business | Good | Man | Mankind | Plan | Study | Thought | Work | Thought |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns.
Authority | Effort | Individual | Self | Submission |
There is no end to prayer. It echoes on forever in your soul. Long after the visible demonstration has been made and forgotten, the prayer that produced it continues to work for your spiritual advancement, for the creative power of a God-thought is unlimited and eternal.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
One instance of the innate and ineradicable inequality of men is their tendency to fall into two classes of leaders and followers. The latter constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authority which will make decisions for them and to which they for the most part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests that more care should be taken than hitherto to educate an upper stratum of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth, whose business it would be to give direction to the dependent masses.
Authority | Business | Care | Inequality | Intimidation | Majority | Men | Need | Submission | Truth | Will | Business |