This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
Consequences | Consideration | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Men | Reason | Speech |
Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.
Consequences | Sin |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. "Let us eat, drink and be merry," says the pessimist, "for to-morrow we die." If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.
Day | Duty | Fear | Forgetfulness | Individual | Life | Life | Light | Music | Pessimism |
Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts.
Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
The only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.
So, life has problems and conflicts and miseries only when you use relationship as a means of becoming, that is, when you gratify yourself through relationship. When I use another, or when I use property or an idea as a means of self-expansion, which is the perpetuation of gratification, then life becomes a series of ceaseless conflicts and miseries. It is only when I understand relationship - which is the beginning of self-knowledge - that self-knowledge brings about right thinking with regard to what is; and it is right thinking that dissolves our problems - not the gurus, not the heroes, not the mahatmas, not the literature, but the capacity to see what is and not escape from what is.
Beginning | Capacity | Life | Life | Means | Problems | Property | Regard | Relationship | Right | Self-knowledge | Thinking | Understand |
Our problem is not, how to make the mind tranquil, still, peaceful, but, to understand, to be free from those problems which agitate the mind. The mind obviously creates the problems. If there is a problem, how do we approach it, with what attitude? How do we experience it? It is that which it is important to understand, and not, how to escape from the problem into tranquillity.
Experience | Important | Mind | Problems |
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.
Understanding | Learn |
If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.
Civilization | Consequences | Indispensable | Property | Rights |
Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.
Body | Children | Language | Memory | Mind | Play | Recreation | Thinking | Time | Child |
It is not uncommon in the modern world for people to retreat into the world of books to escape from the realities of the outside world. The printed word evokes the modern notion of security, with the emphasis on detachment, privacy, autonomy, predictability, and enclosed artificiality.
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
Spiritual traditions have tended to look at the world in four major ways: as a battlefield, as a trap, as a lover, and as the self. The first two - as a stage set for our moral battles or as a prison to escape - are probably familiar, and have in many ways contributed to our lack of care for the world. But what of the other two? Might they shed some useful light on life in an interconnected world?
Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts.
As you think, you travel; and as you love, you attract. You are today where your thoughts have brought you. You cannot escape the result of your thoughts, but you can endure and learn, can accept and be glad... Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less.
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.
Change |
For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects.
Abstract | Consequences | Husband | Ideas | Nature | Nothing | Object | Self | Unity | Parent | Think |
Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that. Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut off the mind from new stimuli. Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.
Capacity | Consequences | Consideration | Desire | Efficiency | Ends | Growth | Light | Means | Mind | Reward | Will | Old |