This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas.
Ideas | Imagination | Memory | Understanding | Wisdom |
Instead of production, primarily, we have to think of sustainability. Instead of dominating nature, we have to acknowledge that nature is our source and best teacher. Instead of understanding the world in parts, we need to think about the whole.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
Judgment | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom | World | Intellect | Understand |
Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.
Art | Mankind | Means | Understanding | Wisdom |
Organized religion obviously prevents the understanding of a problem because the mind is conditioned by dogma and belief.
Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.
Experience | Understanding | Unique | Wisdom |
Truth is not to be known. What is known is a thing of the past; it is already dead. Truth is living, not static; therefore you cannot know truth. Truth is a constant movement, it has not abode, a mind that is tethered to a belief, to knowledge, to a particular conditioning, is incapable of understanding what truth is.
Belief | Knowledge | Mind | Past | Truth | Understanding | Wisdom |
Religion is really experiencing a state in which there is creation. This is not an idea, a process. It can be realized when there is freedom from self. There can be freedom from self only through understanding the self in relationship; but there can be no understanding in isolation.
Freedom | Isolation | Relationship | Religion | Self | Understanding | Wisdom |
Wisdom comes into being only when there is an understanding of knowledge and the freedom from the known... When there is freedom from the known then relationship changes totally.
Freedom | Knowledge | Relationship | Understanding | Wisdom |
Wisdom is alone, but a lonely path does not lead to wisdom. Isolation is death, and wisdom is not found in withdrawal. There is no path to wisdom, for all paths are separative, exclusive. In their very nature, paths can only lead to isolation, though these isolations are called unity, the whole, the one, and so end is as the means. The means is not separate from the goal, the “what should be.” Wisdom comes with the understanding of one’s relationship with the field, with the passer-by, with the fleeting thought. To withdraw, to isolate oneself in order to find, is to put an end to discovery. Relationship leads to an aloneness that is not of isolation. There must be an aloneness, not of the enclosing mind, but of freedom. The complete is the alone, and incompleteness seeks the way of isolation.
Death | Discovery | Freedom | Isolation | Means | Mind | Nature | Order | Relationship | Thought | Understanding | Unity | Wisdom |
It is an established opinion among some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, stamped, as it were, upon the mind of man which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show how many men obtain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any such innate impressions... Let us suppose the mind to be a blank tablet; how comes it to be furnished? To this answer in one word, from experience.
Experience | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Opinion | Principles | Soul | Understanding | Wisdom | World |
The improvement of the understanding is for two ends; first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.
Ends | Improvement | Knowledge | Understanding | Wisdom |
Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
The mind has more to do with holding the fastnesses of life and has more sovereign sway over it than the power of the soul. For without the understanding and the mind no part of the soul can maintain itself in the frame the smallest fraction of time.
Life | Life | Mind | Power | Soul | Time | Understanding | Wisdom |
Real education belongs to the future; most of our education is a form of tribal conditioning, a pilgrimage in routine and premature adjustment. When education stirs our innermost feelings and loyalties, when it awakens us from the slumber of lethargy, when it brings individuals together through understanding and compassion, it becomes our foremost hope for lasting greatness.
Compassion | Education | Feelings | Future | Greatness | Hope | Lethargy | Understanding | Wisdom |
We are here to live and love the fullness of God’s presence...God’s presence awaits us everywhere. In the sum total of daily revelations lies not simply a formula for understanding life but an invitation to immerse ourselves in it. The meaning of life is something to be experienced.
God | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Understanding | Wisdom |
What, then, is the nature of the reality that we believe in evidentially? Transiency is the main reality. We appear to live in an ever-perishing world. It seems that our life is confined to a single instant at a time. We see everything passing away - for ever, as we say, without having the slightest idea of what we mean by this expression. Where does everything go - for ever? Where do our lives go? Certainly they are not contained in a space of three dimensions. We witness, apparently, events, people, and things disappearing into total extinction, into an absolute nothingness, as the result of passing-time. This is the reality of appearances as registered by our senses. There goes with it a particular understanding of life.
Absolute | Events | Life | Life | Nature | People | Reality | Space | Time | Understanding | Wisdom | Witness | World |
I feel that just understanding near-death experiences will be our first step at healing the great division between science and religion that started with Isaac Newton almost three hundred years ago. Educating physicians, nurses, and ourselves about what people experience in those final hours will shatter our prejudices about the ways we think about medicine and life.
Death | Experience | Life | Life | People | Religion | Science | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Think |
Just as education without humanity is the most dangerous thing in the world, so education in love, human understanding and cooperation is the greatest hope of the world.
Cooperation | Education | Hope | Humanity | Love | Understanding | Wisdom | World |