This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Everyone has their own way of changing, or, what amounts to the same thing, of perceiving that everything changes. In this matter, nothing is more arrogant than trying to dictate to others. My way of no longer being the same is, by definition, the most unique part of what I am . Yet God knows there are ideological traffic police around, and we can hear their whistles blast: go left, go right, here, later, get moving, not now... The insistence on identity and the injunction to make a break both, and in the same way, feel like abuses.
It's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
Hypothesis | Individual | Power |
Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
In God, absolute unity is absolute multiplicity, absolute identity is absolute diversity; absolute actuality is absolute potentiality.
Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld
This very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends, and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance….But both [artist and enjoyer], in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.
Art | Ego | Individuality | Mortal | Receive | Religion | Soul | Work | Art |
Incorrect knowledge is mistaking the identity of one thing for the other or one object for another.
Paige Rense, aka Paige Rense Noland
When I quit working, I lost all sense of identity in about fifteen minutes.
Sense |
If thousands of prenatal memories were to come crowding in together, the mind's life would be horrible, crazy. Worse, one's own personal identity would be lost, merged in all the others.
Paul Wellstone, fully Paul David Wellstone
What the poor, the weak, and the inarticulate desperately require is power, organization, and a sense of identity and purpose, not rarefied advice of political scientists.
The magnitude present in any mass is definitely one thing, yet its identity from part to part does not imply any such community as would entail common experience; within that identity there is diversity, for it is a condition only, not the actual Essence.
Present |
Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
Time |
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
Even if the weight of carrying people’s hopes and pains may fall mainly, for a time, on one person’s shoulders, leadership cannot be exercised alone. The lone-warrior model of leadership is heroic suicide. Each of us had blind spots that require the vision of others. Each of us has passions that need to be contained by others.
Attention | Children | Individual | Rank | Rest | Study | Time | Child |
Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL
The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity.
Our Sages were enemies of ignorance. They regarded education, intellectual enlightenment, and the acquisition of knowledge as the first of all moral commandments. They viewed the dissemination of intellectual enlightenment among all classes of the population as the prime concern of the nation, and the training of a child's mind as the first and most sacred duty of fatherhood. They considered it a matter of conscience for every Jewish father to see that his child should not remain a boor and am ha'arets; no Jewish child must be allowed to grow up as an ignorant, uneducated person.
Children | Evil | Fulfillment | Isolation | Nations | Need | Obligation | Order | People | Practice | Praise | Purpose | Purpose | Redemption | Vows | Torah |
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
Change |
Rudra is truly one; for the knowers of Brahman do not admit the existence of a second, He alone rules all the worlds by His powers. He dwells as the inner Self of every living being. After having created all the worlds, He, their Protector, takes them back into Himself at the end of time.
Illusion | Individual | Knowledge | Meditation | Self |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.
Assertion | Bible | Body | Credit | Custom | Danger | Desire | Dogma | Faith | Giving | Humanity | Impossibility | Innovation | Invention | Life | Life | Lord | Man | Means | Men | Present | Regard | Right | Sin | Teach | Unity | Will | Writing | Danger | Bible | Learn | Old |
Wave on wave of life expansion took place for 65 million years. What we are doing when we extinguish the species of trees, extinguish the animals, extinguish the rainforest, we are negating 65 million years of effort. It's not that we are changing human history, we are changing Earth history; we're not just changing human life, we are bringing about a disastrous change in the total life development of the planet Earth.
Achievement | Earth | Energy | Existence | Nothing | Story | Will |