This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL
If that than which no greater can be conceived were only in the understanding, there would be something still greater than it, which assuredly is impossible. Something, therefore, without doubt, exists than which no greater can be conceived, and it is both in the understanding and in reality.
Doubt | Reality | Understanding |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
Just as life is defined as biological change and death as its lack, so meaning in life is characterized by the application of stable patterns to changing circumstances and the replacing of old patterns of understanding with new and exploratory ones. Meaning is found in the losing of it, the searching after it, and in the finding of it again. The meaning in your life is in flux and is to be found in the flux (the flow) of meaning, which is therefore itself a source of meaning in your life. All this does require, however, the developing of a tolerance for ambiguity, of a willingness to accept the inevitability of change and the precariousness of your present vision, and of an openness to the unending richness of your experience of the world in its manifold variety and diversity.
Ambiguity | Change | Circumstances | Death | Diversity | Experience | Life | Life | Meaning | Openness | Present | Understanding | Vision | World | Old |
Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister
Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.
Abuse | Children | Commitment | Conscience | God | Individual | Law | Morality | Obedience | Sin | Soul |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
The ability to become bamboo is a metaphor for reaching beyond the perceptual, intellectual, and feeling habits, expectations, and assumptions of your own psyche and traditions in order to allow the embracing and the understanding of those of another. In actually becoming bamboo it is essential to listen to another with an open mind and heart, and thereby to embrace what you were previously unwilling or unable genuinely to encounter.
Ability | Heart | Mind | Order | Understanding |
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
True patriotism doesn’t exclude an understanding of the patriotism of others.
Any revolution which denies the right to criticize is bound to wallow in stagnation and backwardness.
Revolution | Right |
Action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is not obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable.
Absurd | Action | Authority | Justification | Obedience | Past | Receive | Will | Propaganda |
It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good. Otherwise, he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community.
Enough | Good | Individual | Knowledge | Man | Men | Motives | Order | Personality | Relationship | Sense | Teach | Understanding | Learn | Understand |
The things in our civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared that we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.
Civilization | Faith | Grace | Mankind | Race | Receive | Responsibility |
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 |
You grow in grace and understanding by solving your daily problems as they arise, by the Practice of the Presence of God, by a tolerant attitude toward others, by plan horse sense (which is Divine Wisdom in you), by sincere and honest dealing at all times, and by cultivating a true sense of humor – which always brings us nearer to God. The great point is that life is to be met and mastered. Outer conditions and appearances are simply of no importance in themselves except as they supply material for growth.
God | Grace | Growth | Humor | Life | Life | Plan | Practice | Problems | Sense | Understanding | Wisdom |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Whatever complaints the neurotic patient may have, whatever symptoms he may present are rooted in his inability to love, if we mean by love a capacity for the experience of concern, responsibility, respect, and understanding of another person and the intense desire for that other person’s growth.
Capacity | Desire | Experience | Growth | Love | Present | Respect | Responsibility | Understanding |
A grand meta-narrative is a story of the development and purpose of human history in which we as individual can find a place and play a role. Four basic meta-narratives: (1) Platonic Christian is the idea of life as a journey to another unchanging realm. (2) Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of the consciousness of God. (3) Marx’s notion of another revolution ushering in a new era. (4) Nietzsche’s idea that there is no “beyond” and that the only meaning comes through creative activities through which we shape a life for ourselves.
Consciousness | Era | God | History | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Story |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
A nonviolent revolution is not a program of “seizure of power.” It is a program of transformation of relationships ending in a peaceful transfer of power.
Power | Revolution |
Economic outlooks have replaced more traditional ways of understanding the world, religious, or political, for example.
Example | Understanding | World |
The key to achieving everlasting happiness involves an enlightened four-prong approach: (1) understanding and loving others; (2) being virtuous and serving others; (3) living life fully and in the present; and (4) adopting an indomitable spirit of thankfulness.
Life | Life | Present | Spirit | Thankfulness | Understanding | Happiness |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
In Reality, nothing requires explanation. Nothing is caused by anything else. Existence requires no explanation nor does it have any dependence on any other state or quality. This understanding is clarified by the realization that nothing in and of itself has any `meaning’. Therefore, neither does it have `purpose’. Everything is already complete and merely self-existent as its own self-identity.
Dependence | Existence | Meaning | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Self | Self-identity | Understanding |