This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We become aware of all that is happening within us, of the different emotions arising within us, for example if we begin to get angry we are aware of it and so the grip of anger loosens its hold over us.
Beauty | Darkness | Intelligence | Life | Life | Nothing | Peace | People | Rest | Suffering | Universe | Wonder | World | Beauty |
The world today forces us to accept, at least intellectually, our oneness, our interrelatedness. And more and more people are awakening to the urgency of arresting the accelerating madness around us. As yet, however, our ways of responding are superficial, unequal to the complexities of the challenge. We do not take or even consider actions that threaten our security or alter our habitual ways of drifting through life. If we continue to live carelessly, indifferently, emphasizing private gain and personal indulgence, we are essentially opting for the suicide of humanity.
Beauty | Intelligence | Life | Life | Nothing | Rest | Universe | Wonder | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert.
Beauty | Freedom | Heart | Power | Universe | World | Beauty |
The Utopia that grows impatient and turns into riot knows what awaits her; almost always she is too soon. Then she resigns herself and stoically accepts, instead of triumph, catastrophe.
Universe |
Society cannot progress unless each citizen make his contribution and performs his duties.
The One who created the thing, understands it; He has fashioned all of this.
When we get compliments for our good works we naturally feel elated and happy. On the contrary listening to evil thoughts make us skeptical and confused.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.