This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
There was nothing original in the conception that the world was round; it was held by all educated astronomers of the time. The greatness of Columbus was rather in the courage that he displayed in venturing into the unknown sea to prove the validity of his thesis and his pertinacity in the pursuit of his project.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Emotions | Means | Personality | Poetry |
Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
That [which is beyond every name and form] is comprehended only by the one with no comprehension of it: anyone comprehending, knows it not. Unknown to the knowing, it is the unknowing known.
Knowing |
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Wit should be used as a shield for defense rather than as a sword to wound others.
If we imagine ourselves as being every bit as huge, deep, mysterious, and awe-inspiring as the night sky, we might begin to appreciate how complicated we are as individuals, and how much of who we are is unknown not only to others but to ourselves.
Awe |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Tomorrow’s memory depends upon today’s impressions... Your memory builds your personality, your personality builds your character, and your character determines your destiny.
Character | Destiny | Memory | Personality | Tomorrow |
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.
The soul is more interested in particulars than in generalities. That is true of personal identity as well. Identifying with a group or a syndrome or a diagnosis is giving in to an abstraction. Soul provides a strong sense of individuality - personal destiny, special influences and background, and unique stories. In the face of overwhelming need for both emergency and chronic care, the mental health system labels people schizophrenics, alcoholics, and survivors so that it can bring some order to the chaos of life at home and on the street, but each person has a special story to tell, no matter how many common themes it contains.
Care | Destiny | Giving | Health | Individuality | Life | Life | Need | Order | People | Sense | Soul | Story | System | Unique |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
What then you do call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.
Existence | Power | Revelation | Soul | Thinking |
Every moment can be viewed as new... You cause yourself a great loss by not living in the present... Don’t let the past weigh you down... Realize what is over is over... The future is always an unknown entity so learn to focus on the present... Learn to concentrate on what you are presently doing... Always try to utilize your present moments for growth... If you master feeling joy in your present moments, you need never be concerned you are missing anything, since whatever you are engaged in can be transformed into an elevating experience... You can alleviate pain by living in the present.
Cause | Experience | Focus | Future | Growth | Joy | Need | Pain | Past | Present | Loss | Learn |
To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all to squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionalism and panic animality.
Darkness | Ego | Experience | Little | Panic | Personality | Self |
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Defense | Justice | Liberty | Moderation | Virtue | Virtue | Moderation |
Edward Bernays, fully Edward Louis Bernays
The best defense against propaganda: more propaganda.
Defense |
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Human reason exhausts itself ceaselessly to explain the inexplicable. Explanation itself is high comedy, as preposterous as trying to see the back of one's own head, but the vanity of the ego is boundless, and it becomes even more overblown by this very attempt to make sense of nonsense. The mind, in its identity with the ego, cannot by definition, comprehend reality; if it could, it would instantly dissolve itself upon recognizing its own illusory nature. It's only beyond the paradox of mind transcending ego that what IS stands forth, self-evident and dazzling in its infinite Absoluteness. And then all of these words are useless.
Comedy | Ego | Mind | Nature | Nonsense | Paradox | Reality | Reason | Self | Sense | Words |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Means | Personality |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
One social structure will be conducive to cooperation and solidarity another social structure to competition, suspiciousness, avarice; another to child-like receptiveness, another to destructive aggressiveness. All empirical forms or human needs and drives have to be understood as results of the social practice (in the last analysis based on the productive forces, class structure, etc., etc.) but they all have to fulfill the functions which are inherent in man’s nature in general, and that is to permit him to relate himself to others and share a common frame of reference, etc. The existential contradiction within man (to which I would now add also the contradiction between limitations which reality imposes on his life, and the virtually limitless imagination which his brain permits him to follow) is what I believe to be one of the motives of psychological and social dynamics. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him. The question then arises whether there is an optimal solution which can be inferred from man’s nature, and which constitutes a potential tendency in man. I believe that such optimal solutions can be inferred from the nature of man, and I have recently found it quite useful to think in terms of what in sociology and economy is now often called »system analysis«. One might start with the idea, in the first place, that human personality — just like society — is a system, that is to say, that each part depends on every other, and no part can be changed unless all or most other parts are also changed. A system is better than chaos. If a society system disintegrates or is destroyed by blows from the outside the society ends in chaos, and a completely new society is built upon its ruins, often using the elements of the destroyed system to build the new. That has happened many times in history. But, what also happens is that the society is not simply destroyed but that the system is changed, and a new system emerges which can be considered to be a transformation of the old one.
Better | Contradiction | Cooperation | Ends | Imagination | Man | Motives | Nature | Personality | Practice | Question | Reality | Society | System | Will | Society | Old | Think |