This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
David J. Schwartz, fully David Joseph Schwartz
Believe Big. The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief. Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success. Remember this, too! Big ideas and big plans are often easier – certainly no more difficult – than small ideas and small plans.
In summary, goals or end-states are not intrinsically valuable, even though they direct and explain action. Although having aims or goals is an important and unavoidable aspect of life, it is a mistake to confuse those goals with non-instrumental value because this would imply that activities are merely instrumentally valuable. It is the goals of our activities that are instrumentally valuable; they are valuable to achieve because they lead to further worthwhile activities.
Action | Aims | Goals | Important | Life | Life | Mistake | Value |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one’s work.
Unknown Aboriginal Australian NULL
If you’re coming to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL
Material civilization, nay, even luxury, is necessary to create work for the poor.
Civilization | Luxury | Work |
If there’s a single bet we`ve missed over the years, it’s making kids sit quietly at their desks instead of letting them work with each other.
Work |
Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL
Duty becomes a disease with us; it drags us ever forward... This duty, this idea of duty is the midday summer sun which scorches the innermost soul of mankind... The only true duty is to be unattached and to work as free beings, to give up all work unto God.
We are not merely instruments, either for our own goals or for those of God. This is why it is a mistake to identify the meaning of life with a goal…. This does not imply that our own goals are not and should not be important to our lives… just that they are not the meaning of life in themselves.
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.
Contradiction | Responsibility | Work | Leadership |
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
In the beginning was God, today was God, tomorrow will be God. Who can make an image of God? He has no body. He is as a work which comes out of your mouth. That word! It is no more, it is past, and still it lives! So is God.
Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
We could make our lives so much more interesting, and develop so many new capacities, if we sought to work with the unknowns of emergence, rather than try and plan surprise out of our lives.
To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards.
Work |
Computational irreducibility tends to make infinite questions undecidable. The presence of universality implies that there must at some level be computational irreducibility… This means that today’s mathematics will be viewed as small and surprisingly uncharacteristic sample of what is possible. If a system is computationally irreducible this means that there is in effect a tangible separation between the underlying rules for the system and its overall behavior associated with the irreducible amount of computational work needed to go from one to the other. And it is this separation that the basic origin of the apparent freedom we see in all sorts of system lie – whether those systems are abstract cellular automata or actual living brains.
Abstract | Behavior | Freedom | Mathematics | Means | System | Will | Work |