This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Jaron Lanier, fully Jaron Zepel Lanier
Life is based on limitation and compromise. The fact that we forget the meaning of life is the meaning of life. Being in a state of partial awareness allows experience and life to progress. God, as an omniscient being, is not an “experiencing being” because his or her experience is not new. If You were going to start a universe, what would Your options be? You could choose to remain totally stagnant, but that wouldn’t amount to a true universe. You’d need entities that experience it, entities that are fragile and temporary and not omniscient. That’s who we are and why we’re here.
Awareness | Character | Experience | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Need | Progress | Universe | Awareness |
Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Aggression | Character | Love | Man | Method | Retaliation | Revenge |
Our culture needs a great deal more than a changed lifestyle. In the Western mind, thought-structures and the relationship between consciousness and matter are badly out of balance, so that our world has become wholly pervaded by a materialism that is threatening to squash us to death. We are in a state of materialistic hypertrophy, and our eventual self-destruction would in fact be no more than the logical consequence of our attitudes.
Balance | Character | Consciousness | Culture | Death | Materialism | Mind | Relationship | Self | Thought | World |
The fool exposes the limitations of human criteria, confronts us anew with the undefined nature of our cosmic existence, leads us backstage to make us aware of the artificiality of our cultural values, and then shows us a world without limit, because it is neither categorized nor ordered in accordance with artificial opposites. The sick jester removes these opposites, tears down external and internal barriers and causes us to tumble head over heels from our tailor-made world of lines and demarcations into a more comprehensive and holistic dimension that has no beginning or end.
Beginning | Character | Existence | Nature | Tears | World |
In giving yourself over wholly to whatever you are doing at the moment you can achieve a deeper and richer state of mind.
Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva
Justice is immortal, eternal, and immutable, like God Himself; and the development of law is only then a progress when it is directed towards those principles which always like Him, are eternal; and whenever prejudice of error succeeds in establishing in customary law any doctrine contrary to eternal justice.
Character | Doctrine | Error | Eternal | God | Justice | Law | Prejudice | Principles | Progress | God |
Right thinking, surely, is entirely different from right thought. Right thought is static... Right thinking is the understanding of relationship from moment to moment, which uncovers the whole process of the self.
Character | Relationship | Right | Self | Thinking | Thought | Understanding | Thought |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
When at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment of each one of us - recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state - our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions - were we truly men of courage... were we truly men of judgment... were we truly men of integrity... were we truly men of dedication?
Character | Courage | Dedication | Failure | Future | History | Integrity | Judgment | Men | Office | Service | Success | Will |
The truth of not-knowing is the only factor from which one can move. The truth of that is stable. A mind that does not know is in a state of learning. The moment I say I have learned, I have stopped learning and that stopping is the stability of division.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as to a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.
Action | Character | God | Mind | Truth | Understanding | Wishes | God | Understand |
Reality comes into being only when the mind is still, not made still. Therefore, there must be no disciplining of the mind to be still. When you discipline yourself, it is merely a projected desire to be in a particular state. Such a state is not the state of passivity... Liberation is from moment to moment in the understanding of what is, when the mind is free, not made free. It is only a free mind that can discover, not a mind molded by a belief or shaped according to a hypothesis. Such a mind cannot discover. There can be no freedom is there is conflict, for conflict is the fixing of the self in relationship.
Belief | Character | Desire | Discipline | Freedom | Hypothesis | Mind | Reality | Relationship | Self | Understanding |
George Leonard, fully George Burr Leonard
Conservation is a state of harmony between man and land.
Character | Conservation | Harmony | Land | Man |
Nothing being so beautiful to the eye as truth is to the mind; nothing so deformed and irreconcilable to the understanding as a lie.
Character | Mind | Nothing | Truth | Understanding |