This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The possibilities of our future are actually determined by collective choices in the present. The evidence simply states that the choice of many people, focused in a specific manner, has a direct and measurable effect on our quality of life. Quantum physics suggests that by redirecting our focus – where we place our attention – we bring a new course of events into focus while at the same time releasing an existing course of events that may no longer serve us.
Attention | Choice | Events | Evidence | Focus | Future | Life | Life | People | Present | Time |
William Bridges, fully Sir William Throsby Bridges
Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.
When you give your attention to anything, you are building that thing into your consciousness, for good or evil. When you are faced with some negative condition in your own life, the scientific way to handle it is to withdraw your attention form it by building the opposite into your subconscious, and when you have done this the undesirable thing falls away like an overripe fruit... Don’t tear away people’s crutches (or your own). When they are no longer needed they will fall away. Dissolve the need.
Attention | Consciousness | Evil | Good | Life | Life | Need | People | Will |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
It is not attention that the child is seeking but love.
The present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in five minutes or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life is to live in the present, and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment, and in the place where your body is now.
Attention | Body | Despair | Law | Life | Life | People | Present | Time |
Does your calculus of success include the bottom line of death, or are you mortgaging your future for the immediate and the short term? Have you been tranquilized by the trivial, or does your sense of life grow from a close attention to reality and time?
Attention | Death | Future | Life | Life | Reality | Sense | Success | Time |
The act of praying centers attention on the higher emotion, unifies the spirit, crystallizes emotions, clarifies the judgments, releases latent powers, reinforces confidence that what needs to be done can be done.
Attention | Confidence | Emotions | Spirit |
Religion is a quiet dimension of daily living; it is not a spectacular explosion.
The historical Jesus has a different category of sins from that of the Old Testament or of Paul or of ecclesiastical writers after him. The sins which occupied the attention of Jesus were hypocrisy, wordliness, intolerance, and selfishness. The sins which occupy the principal attention of the Church… are impurity, murder, the drinking of alcohol, swearing, the neglect of the Church’s services and ordinances.
Attention | Church | Hypocrisy | Intolerance | Murder | Neglect | Selfishness | Old Testament | Old |
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disentrall ourselves.
Difficulty | Past | Present | Quiet | Think |
James A. Michener, fully James Albert Michener
Self-respect cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that knowing the good, we have gone for the great.
Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
Mind | Perception | Quiet | World |
If you want to find out how well you are living up to your spiritual values and higher principles, pay close attention to how you behave in the middle of an argument or a tense moment involving someone you live with, work with, or are in love with.
Argument | Attention | Love | Principles | Work |
At particular epochs of their life, [children] reveal an intense and extraordinary interest in certain objects and exercises, which one might look for in vain at a later age… Such attention is not the results of mere curiosity; it is more like a burning passion. A keen emotion first rises from the depths of the unconscious, and sets in motion a marvelous creative activity in contact with the outside world, thus building up consciousness.
Age | Attention | Children | Consciousness | Curiosity | Life | Life | Passion | World |
Rather than attend to those things we love, we give the bulk of our attention instead to things that bring us harm.