This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Understanding religious differences makes for a better understanding of other differences and for an appreciation of the sacredness of human personality as basic to human freedom.
Appreciation | Better | Freedom | Personality | Understanding | Appreciation |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Whereas Truth is complete and unchanging, on the contrary, man’s understanding and capacity for comprehension significantly advances and changes in all areas of knowledge. With it, significance and meaning become contextualized so that, although truth does not change, man’s understanding of it certainly does.
Capacity | Change | Knowledge | Man | Meaning | Truth | Understanding |
Get but that “peace of God which passeth understanding,” and the questions of the understanding will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest.
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
Knowledge creates doubt, and doubt makes you ravenous for more knowledge. You can’t get full eating this way. The wise person dines on something more subtle: he eats the understanding that the named was born from the unnamed, that all being flows from non-being, that the describable world emanates from an indescribable source. He finds this subtle truth inside his own self, and becomes completely content.
Doubt | Knowledge | Self | Truth | Understanding | Wise | World |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Anarchism (from the Greek… contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – Harmony in such a society not being obtained by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted form the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
Authority | Conduct | Government | Harmony | Law | Life | Life | Obedience | Society | Submission | Society | Government |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else… Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.
Complacency | Evil | Individual | Nature | Nothing | Responsibility | Society | Understanding | Society |
We accumulate opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
Age | Understanding |
Jayaprakash Narayan, known as JP Narayan, Jayaprakash or Loknayak
A violent revolution has always brought forth a dictatorship of some kind or another… After revolution, a new privileged class of rulers and exploiters grows up in the course of time to which the people at large is once again subject.
People | Revolution | Time |
The mission of art is to achieve a deeper understanding of nature’s beauty. The mission, to put it another way, is to observe nature with an artistic mind, a mind bent on discovering beauty. Therefore, the kind of nature that the average person sees does not make art when it is reproduced.
Art | Beauty | Mind | Mission | Nature | Understanding | Art |
Iris Murdoch, aka Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
Freedom | Knowing | Understanding |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Advance in understanding of nature or even in control of nature does not diminish God. God is not the sum total of what man does not know about nature or what man cannot control in nature.
Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.
Appreciation | Beginning | Life | Life | Mankind | Understanding | Will | Wonder | Worth | Happiness |
Maximilien Robespierre, fully Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre
If virtue be the spring of popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is the only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
Democracy | Government | Justice | Peace | Revolution | Terror | Virtue | Virtue | Wants | Government |