This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
This has also appeared in the alternate form: What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Consequences | Knowledge | Nothing | System | Theoretical |
It is a poor species of human being which this grim vision conjures up before our eyes: 'fragmentary and disintegrated' man, the end product of growing mechanization, specialization, and functionalization, which decompose the unity of human personality and dissolve it in the mass, an aborted form of Homo sapiens created by a largely technical civilization, a race of spiritual and moral pygmies lending itself willingly--indeed gladly, because that way lies redemption--to use as raw material for the modern collectivist and totalitarian mass state.
Consequences | Consideration | Sacrifice | Sense | Society | Will | Society |
Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual’s capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.
Civilization | Consequences | Man |
The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.
Twenty years hence my eyes may grow if not quite dim, yet rather so, still yours from others they shall know twenty years hence. Twenty years hence though it may hap that I be called to take a nap in a cool cell where thunderclap was never heard. there breathe but o'er my arch of grass a not too sadly sighed alas, and I shall catch, ere you can pass, that winged word.
We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
Consequences | Events | Government | Men | Public | Thought | Will | Government | Crisis | Thought |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Homeric and the pre-Homeric Greeks, like oral peoples generally, practiced public speaking with great skill long before their skills were reduced to an "art", that is, to a body of sequentially organized, scientific principles which explained and abetted what verbal persuasion consisted in. Such an "art" is presented in Aristotle"s Art of Rhetoric. Oral cultures, as has been seen, can have no "arts" of this scientifically organized sort. The "art" of rhetoric, though concerned with oral speech, was, like other "arts," the product of writing.
Birth | Individual | Literature | Man | Personality | Regard | Sense | Sound | Speech | Words | World | Think |
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
How does man become mind? Clear intelligence and clear intelligence alone. We know, then, in all that fills heaven and earth there is but this clear intelligence. It is only because of their physical forms and bodies that men are separated. My clear intelligence is the master of heaven and earth and spiritual beings. If heaven is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its height? If earth is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its height? If earth is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its depth? If spiritual beings are deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to distinguish their good and evil fortune or the calamities and blessings that they will bring? Separated from my clear intelligence, there will be no heaven, earth, spiritual beings, or myriad things, and separated from these, there will not be my clear intelligence. Thus they are all permeated with one material force. How can they be separated?
Affliction | Father | Humanity | Husband | Relationship | Wife | Afraid |
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
The word ge in gewu is the same as the ge in Mengzi’s expression, ‘A great man recti?ed (ge) the ruler’s mind.’ Gewu means to eliminate whatever is incorrect in the mind and preserve the correctness of its original substance. Wherever there is a thought, eliminate whatever is incorrect and preserve the mind’s original substance. Then in all places, at all times, the Heavenly li will de?nitely be preserved.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Each person on this planet is inherently, intrinsically capable of attaining dizzying heights of happiness and fulfillment.
Consequences | Opinion | Wants | Will |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
Humility, metaphysically, implies the absence of any entity to be either 'proud' or 'humble'.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without.
Defeat | Dependence | Doctrine | Heart | Knowing | Knowledge | Language | Literature | Means | Method | Mind | People | Popularity | Time | Understanding |
The Peace of Wild Things - When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
Abstract | Art | Dependence | Earth | Family | Giving | Good | Guilt | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Need | Present | Thought | Usefulness | Work | Art | Guilty | Thought |
We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the earth or submit to such an involvement in our destructiveness that the earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed. And we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Slowly we are learning, we at least know this much, that we have to unlearn much that we were taught, and are growing chary of emphatic dogmas; Love like Matter is much odder than we thought.