This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air; The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go; They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all,— There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall. Feast, and your halls are crowded; Fast, and the world goes by. Succeed and give, and it helps you live, But no man can help you die. There is room in the halls of pleasure For a large and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain
Earth | Enough | Man | Men | Need | Will | World | Trouble | Friends | Old |
The commandment of knowledge is yet higher than the commandment over the will: for it is a commandment over the reason, belief, and understanding of man, which is the highest part of the mind, and giveth law to the will itself. For there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne or chair of estate in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning.
Belief | Earth | Knowledge | Law | Learning | Man | Men | Mind | Power | Reason | Understanding | Will |
All the crimes on earth do not destroy so much of the human race, nor alienate so much property as drunkenness.
Destroy | Earth | Human race | Property | Race |
Frederick II, `Frederick the Great’ NULL
Every man must get to heaven his own way.
George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
The sole means now for the savings of the beings on the planet Earth would be to implant into their presences a new organ with such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence and also the tendency to hate others which flows from it - the tendency, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them themselves and for the whole Universe.
Attention | Cause | Death | Destroy | Earth | Existence | Hate | Means | Sense | Universe |
An honest man feels that he must pay heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard unselfish work to make others happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Good | Happy | Heaven | Man | Right | Wealth | Work | Happiness |
Frederick II, `Frederick the Great’ NULL
All religions must be tolerated, for every man must get to heaven in his own way.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a world all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit - it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit.
Earth | Eternal | Existence | Heaven | Important | Man | Mind | Need | Spirit | World | Absurdity | Truths |
The instinct for justice, when equipped with all the resources of technology, is capable of laying waste to the earth itself.
Earth | Instinct | Justice | Technology | Waste |
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us some a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away; of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time.
Absolute | Beginning | Earth | Nature | Silence | Sound | Time |