This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist - this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul - a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
Art | Day | Life | Life | Men | Mind | Music | Past | Play | Present | Soul | Art |
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
A righteous person once asked, “On which day of your life did you experience the greatest amount of joy?” The righteous man replied, “It was the day when I traveled on a ship and someone greatly humiliated me. He treated me with ultimate disgrace. Nevertheless I did not feel even a drop of resentment. I experienced great joy that I reached such a level that no insult could cause me any pain.”
Cause | Day | Disgrace | Experience | Insult | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Pain | Resentment | Insult |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Every one must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised.
Just as a mountain is constantly being shaped by weather, our character can be reformed by our choices. Our human capacity to reason and choose makes the formation of our character an ongoing process. Each day we can decide to be different.
Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred.
Day | God | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Meaning | Power | Sacred | God | Happiness |
Riches are the pettiest and least worthy gifts which God can give a man. What are they; to God’s word? Yea, to bodily gifts, such as beauty and health, or to the gifts of the mind such as understanding, skill, wisdom? Yet men toil for them day and night and take no rest. Therefore our Lord God commonly gives riches to foolish people to whom He gives nothing else.
Beauty | Day | God | Health | Lord | Man | Men | Mind | Nothing | People | Rest | Riches | Skill | Understanding | Wisdom | Riches | Beauty | God |
Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his faith’. Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressible sweet in greater love.
Day | Faith | God | Grace | Hate | Justice | Love | Meaning | Mercy | Paradise | Righteousness | Scripture | God |
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
The soul has nothing in common with anything else. It is unconscious of the yesterday or the day before, and of tomorrow and the day after, for in eternity there is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence, and is at this moment, and as it will be after death.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
Day | Existence | Future | God | History | Life | Life | People | Responsibility | Style | Will | God |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
In the lives of many people it is possible to find a unifying purpose that justifies the things they do day in, day out – a goal that like a magnetic field attracts their psychic energy, a goal upon which all lesser goals depend… Without such a purpose, even the best-ordered consciousness lacks meaning.
Consciousness | Day | Energy | Goals | Meaning | People | Purpose | Purpose |
Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Day | Little | Television |
Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
Humanity will one day find that it is not a diversity of creeds but the very same creed which is everywhere proposed. There can not be but one wisdom. Humans must therefore all agree that there is but one most imple wisdom whose power is infinite. And everyone in explaining the intensity of this beauty must discover that it is a supreme and terrible beauty.
Beauty | Creed | Day | Diversity | Humanity | Power | Will | Wisdom | Beauty |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The ordinary person is influenced by his worldly environment. The man of concentration shapes his own life. He plans his day and finds at the end of the day that his plans are carried out; he finds himself nearer to God and his goal. A weak man plans many wonderful things, but finds at the end of the day that he has been a victim of circumstances and bad habits. Such a person usually blames everyone but himself.
Circumstances | Day | God | Life | Life | Man | God | Victim |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character… I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.
Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors. They taste no real or substantial pleasure; but, resembling so many brutes, with eyes always fixed on the earth, and intent upon their loaden tables, they pamper themselves in luxury and excess.
Day | Earth | Excess | Life | Life | Luxury | Pleasure | Taste | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |