This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ten Success Rules: Put success before amusement. Learn something every day. Cut free from routine. Concentrate on net profits. Make your services known. Never worry over trifles. Shape your decisions quickly. Acquire skill and technique. Deserve loyalty and co-operation. Value character above all.
Character | Day | Loyalty | Loyalty | Skill | Success | Trifles | Worry | Learn | Value |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
Vision |
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
Vision |
True spirituality is not a removal or escape from life. It is an opening, a seeing of the world with a deeper vision that is less self-centered, a vision that sees through dualistic views to the underlying interconnectedness of all life. Liberation is the discovery of freedom in the very midst of our bodies and minds.
Discovery | Freedom | Life | Life | Self | Spirituality | Vision | World | Discovery |
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
What a superlatively grand and consoling idea is that of death! Without this radiant idea - this delightful morning star, indicting that the luminary of eternity is going to rise, life would, to my view, darken into midnight melancholy. The expectation of living here, and living thus always, would be indeed a prospect of overwhelming despair. But thanks to that fatal decree that dooms us to die; thanks to that gospel which opens the vision of an endless life; and thanks above all to that Saviour friend who has promised to conduct the faithful through the sacred trance of death, into scenes of Paradise and everlasting delight.
Conduct | Death | Despair | Eternity | Expectation | Friend | Life | Life | Melancholy | Paradise | Sacred | Vision | Expectation |
The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness of our own clinging and rejecting, and a willingness to grapple with these mind states, however painful the encounter, can free us from this circle of suffering. Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest.
Fear | Harm | Ideals | Means | Mind | Mindfulness | Practice | Responsibility | Self | Self-interest | Suffering | Vision | Understand |
Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.
Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
It is the little things that fret and worry us; we can dodge an elephant, but we can't dodge a fly.
Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future.
Compassion | Culture | Future | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Spirit | Vision |
We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying unable to sit still.
Discontent | Earth | Future | Present | Worry |
Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one's daydream to its natural consummation, although if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.
Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after his is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought - the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.
Joy | Men | Power | Thought | Vision | Will | World | Thought |