This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false, and the false with the true.
Hate | Man | Objectivity | Personality | Sense | Ugly | Unity |
People do not define themselves directly through a chronology of life experiences. Rather, they define themselves through the expression of selected life experiences... people crystallize certain experiences into themes… considered building blocks of identity. Identity in old age – the ageless self – is founded on the present significance of past experience, the current rendering of meaningful symbols and events of a life.
Age | Events | Experience | Life | Life | Old age | Past | People | Present | Self | Old |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. It is tremendously conservative, not to say torpid. Only acute necessity is able to rouse it. The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity.
Insight | Necessity | Nothing | Personality |
Personal identity as a phenomenon can be studied only in the present; the researcher cannot know about those themes which have been altered or abandoned, because the integration of experience takes place only through presently existing frameworks of understanding.
Experience | Integration | Present | Understanding |
Reading is actually plunging into one’s own identity and, one hopes, emerging stronger than before. You see, unconsciously, we are seeking to find an affirmation to our own world perception and set of values.
Perception | Reading | World |
To save one’s soul is not an instantaneous deed, but a life-long adventure… The creation of a type of personality through loyalty to concrete values as these are at issue in everyday experience.
Adventure | Experience | Life | Life | Loyalty | Loyalty | Personality | Soul |
This is the meaning of life - continuously to add something we haven’t know so far. That, anyway, is the meaning of all existing things. Existence is built upon the idea of the creative - that there is always something unknown to be discovered, which causes and motivates new perception, new studies, the energy to go on.
When the print press examines a politician’s performance, very few voters are interested in detail. The essence of the modern campaign is personality politics: the direct impressions that viewers form from thirty-second daily blips on the Boss Tube, preaching homilies and honing bumpers-sticker themes to stick in voter’s memories.
Personality | Politics |
[Someone said] a man is in fact three men – what he thinks he is – what others think he is – and what he really is. There is, I think, still a fourth identity – what he tries to be. My hunch is that what he tries to be fuses all the others and brings the true portrait of the man into focus.
To say that God exceeds the powers of our comprehension is not to say that we do not know God. We know empirically the actual, present, dynamic working of creativity in our midst, progressively creating, saving and transforming the personality of man when required conditions are present. Therefore we know God and know him more intimately than any other, because he is so deeply involved in our existence. But to know God thus does not mean that we can construct in our imagination a picture of him or comprehend the depth and fullness of his being.
Creativity | Dynamic | Existence | God | Imagination | Man | Personality | Present | God |
If by prayer I mean the power of words to persuade God to do things, then prayer is futile and foolish. One might utter the words of the most devout prayer that was ever breathed and yet not be praying at all. It is the attitude of the personality which is the prayer, not the words.
I'm not sure whether it is possible to ever be completely confident in your identity if you aren't allowed to fashion it early.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Defense | Justice | Liberty | Moderation | Virtue | Virtue | Moderation |
Love confronts hate in the one way hate cannot comprehend, with something beyond itself - with compassion. Hate cannot go beyond itself. It draws its strength from the self's defense of self. Love lives to go beyond itself, drawing strength from that very act. Love can thus comprehend hate, integrating it into something larger. Slowly, hate is defeated as a grain of salt dissolves into the sweetness of a pond.