This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -- or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.
Blame | Future | Inquisitiveness | Writing |
No one ever loses anyone. We are all one soul that needs to continue growing and developing in order for the world to carry on and for us all to meet once again… No one is alone in their troubles; there is always someone else thinking, rejoicing, or suffering in the same way, and that gives us the strength to confront the challenge before us… No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people's eyes, to reveal the marvels around… No one places her dreams in the hands of those who might destroy them… No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine.
Challenge | Destroy | Dreams | Light | Nothing | Order | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Strength | Suffering | Thought | Time | World | Thought |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows what people cannot do, but never sees what they can do, will undermine the spirit of the organisation. Of course, a manager should have a clear grasp of the limitations of his people, but he should see these as limitations on what they can do, and as a challenge to them to do better.
Challenge | Man | People | Position | Spirit | Vision | Will |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
The productivity of the newly dominant groups in the work force, knowledge workers and service workers, will be the biggest and toughest challenge facing managers in the developed countries for decades to come. And serious work on this daunting task has only begun.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Please accept the fact that the human race is split three ways: some people can take in information by looking at figures, some by looking at graphs, and a third group only by touching it, feeling it, or writing it.
Human race | People | Race | Writing |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
Commitment to the truth… means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events.
Challenge | Means | Theories | Understanding |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work--still abysmally low--will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people.
Ability | Challenge | Danger | Dignity | Knowledge | Majority | Service | Society | Will | Society | Danger |
Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of human beings than any other liberation movement. The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or boycotts. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that morality counts for nothing when it clashes with self-interest, as the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels and terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible?
Altruism | Capacity | Challenge | Morality | Nothing | Position | Power | Tyranny | Will |
Virtue, thou in rags, may challenge more than vice set off with all the trim of greatness.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Good manners, to those one does not love, are no more a breach of truth, than "your humble servant," at the bottom of a challenge is; they are universally agreed upon, and understand to be things of course. They are necessary guards of the decency and peace of society.
Challenge | Peace | Understand |
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
People | Unhappiness | Writing | Think |
Pierre Abelard, aka Abailard or Abaelard or Habalaarz
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
To bring the sublime into the mundane is the greatest challenge there is.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Fortunately for all the societies which do not perish in this sort of transition from one basic order to another, the disintegration process often generates the emergence of mobilization of forces opposed to it. Weak and insignificant at the beginning, these forces slowly grow and then start not only to fight the disintegration but also to plan and then to build a new sociocultural order which can meet more adequately the gigantic challenge of the critical transition and of the post-transitory future. This process of emergence and growth of the forces planning and building the new order has also appeared and is slowly developing now… The epochal struggle between the increasingly sterile and destructive forces of the dying sensate order and the creative forces of the emerging, integral, sociocultural order marks all areas of today’s culture and social life, and deeply affects the way of life of every one of us.
Challenge | Culture | Growth | Life | Life | Order | Plan | Struggle |
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written in writing what deserves to be read and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.
A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.
Challenge | Freedom | Man | Reality | Temptation | Temptation |