This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.
Human nature | Mercy | Nature | Temptation | Will | Temptation |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very little sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover what had seemed an unimportant brook.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The four sacred arts require the leaving aside of the personal psyche and being taken or vastly influenced by the Transcendent process. Information appears and response patterns appear that you know are not your ordinary dynamics. Patriarchy has brought us to consciousness, discernment, differentiation, and it has appreciated what the Feminine cannot appreciate. It provides meaning, purpose, understanding how things work, it provided technology, it is form, structure – it is not to be resented – it is the law. The law is always resented, but, what is the function of the law? It establishes boundaries, and it sets up a demeanor that actually transforms certain very primitive images and contains them in some way. The shadow content of the Masculine is rigidity, tyranny, alienation, indifference to relationships, extreme impersonality. The Feminine is connection, wholeness, nurturing as a primary process, giving substance of itself to create a life, to be involved in the production of feeling and wisdom. Knowledge is an aspect of the Masculine. It´s very important to know the difference between information/knowledge, and wisdom. No matter how much knowledge you have in your life, it will never lead you to wholeness – that requires wisdom, awareness of rhythms and cycles. The Feminine is involved in the creation of time and space, rhythms and movement. If you want to get in touch with and experience time and space, you don’t go to the Masculine psyche, you go to the Feminine. If you want information about time and space, you go to the Masculine side – information, conceptualizations, distinctions, discernment. The shadow of the Feminine involves chaos, destruction, devouring. When either side is devalued, it indicates a defense at an unconscious level because it has power over you. The whole idea of what is Feminine is really quite an adventure at this point in time. It was mistaken for warrior-like qualities – these are all in defense to what is really one of its most powerful attributes: the vulnerability, the chaos, the non-rational. The Women’s movement failed because it was involved with the Feminine, but in reaction, with a masculine kind of energetic, so they masculinized women. To get vulnerable again and discover what these forces are means to let go of collective images, and rediscover them for ourselves.
Ego | Humanity | Love | Mystery | Nature | Need | Wholeness |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The surface mind is like a dinghy on a vast sea. Dreams are the dimension for initiation and awakenings. Revelations, healing, or the reflection of a potential healing show up in dreams. One puts oneself into a vulnerable position because one surrenders the surface mind’s preferential viewpoint and goes into letting the dream reveal what its forces might be, and what the intent of the vaster nature is. Denied aspects by the surface psyche are cast into the unconscious where they live their material and influence not only us but others as well, whether we are conscious of it or not. The ego can’t project, it can’t cast out, it is predominantly a witness. What you think are your resources, and who and what you think you are is really a mask, and it precludes your seeing the authentic being. The whole development in the second half of life is to discover the authentic being and to release the defenses, and the masks, and meeting other people’s expectations. We begin to explore the mystery of natural beingness which is a very strange things for human beings – we have to be trained back into it.
Body | Disease | Energy | Experience | Life | Life | Love | Nature |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.
Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The unconscious is composed of multiple, autonomous personalities. These personalities affect our state of health -- from allergic response to disease states such as diabetes and cancer. He suggests that the unconscious mind is far more extensive and powerful than is generally acknowledged, and that the normal conscious mind cannot hope to control the personalities within. Esoteric rites and initiations, he maintains, were designed to call forth particular personalities from the unconscious at appropriate stages of development.
Dreams | Ego | Influence | Life | Life | Mind | Mystery | Nature | Position | Reflection | Think |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Faith always presented to the mind the idea of an abnormal intellectual condition, of the subversion or suspension of the critical faculties. It sometimes comprised more than this, but it always included this. It was the opposite of doubt and of the spirit of doubt. What irreverent men called credulity, reverent men called faith; and although one word was more respectful than the other, yet the two words were with most men strictly synonymous.
Age | Character | Contemplation | Imagination | Men | Nature | Suffering | Contemplation | Old |
The second I left my old life's cowpath, I discovered I didn't need a drink. It became possible to stand still in the dark under the oaks, hands at my sides, and watch and wait.
Search |
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Nature | Question | Speculation | Technology |
Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.
Search |
Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)
Beauty | Evil | Existence | God | Good | Man | Order | People | Search | Time | Wrong | Beauty | God | Child |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
Ends | Glory | Men | Right | Righteousness | Search | Training | Truth | Work | Think |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Consequently, since this study is vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.
Belief | Body | Education | Human nature | Nature | Observation | Receive | Will | Instruction |
Soldier, there is a war between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night. It is for that the poet is always in the sun, patches the moon together in his room to his virgilian cadences, up down, up down. It is a war that never ends.
Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, so that they become an impalpable town, full of impalpable bells, transparencies of sound, sounding in the transparent dwellings of the self, impalpable habitations that seem to move in the movement of the colors of the mind.
Nature |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Moreover, they collected from the members of the human body the proportionate dimensions which appear necessary in all building operations; the finger or inch, the palm, the foot, the cubit. and these they grouped into the perfect number which the Greeks call teleon. Now the ancients determined as perfect the number which is called ten. For from the hands they took the number of the inches; from the palm, the foot was discovered. Now while in the two palms with their fingers, ten inches are naturally complete, Plato considered that number perfect, for the reason that from the individual things which are called monades among the Greeks, the decad is perfect. But as soon as they are made eleven or twelve, because they are in excess, they cannot be perfect until they reach the second decad. For individual things are minor parts of that number.
The old brown hen and the old blue sky, between the two we live and die the broken cartwheel on the hill.
Nature |