This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In Confucianism, all of us - men and women - are born soldiers. The soldier is the universal individual. No matter what you do for a living - doctor, lawyer, fisherman, thief - you are a fighter. Life is war. The war is to maintain personal integrity in a world that demands betrayal and corruption. All behavior is strategy and tactics. All relationships are martial. Marriages are military alliances.
Behavior | Betrayal | Character | Corruption | Individual | Integrity | Life | Life | Men | War | World |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
To reach the depths of the beauty of our souls in our close relationships, we must be prepared to walk into the dark side of intimacy and out the other side into the light. Our most meaningful relationships are based on what we are capable of becoming, rather than on what we have been or what we are, on our longing for expansion rather than our preoccupation with comfort and security.
Beauty | Character | Comfort | Light | Longing | Security | Beauty |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
To live exuberantly - to fully know and be fully known - we must be prepared to risk lighting a candle to illuminate the darkness of even our most intimate relationships, revealing ourselves and seeing clearly all that is revealed. To grow in our relationships and to expand as individuals within them, we must exchange the glorious unreality of the honeymoon for something even better...
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Personal relationships are a major cause of unhappiness... Trying to find successful ways of dealing with people according to their personality traits is futile and time-consuming, and it puts the emphasis on outer characteristics rather than where it belongs, which is on the inner... There is an underlying sameness to us all... Operating from the space-time continuum, it is too easy to see others as different from us, to see boundaries, to be exclusive. Operating from our spiritual center, however, is to see others as part of ourselves, to see no boundaries, to be inclusive.
Cause | Character | People | Personality | Space | Time | Unhappiness |
In surrender we can both give and receive. Relationships take on a different meaning. We learn to be in someone’s life without being in their dance. A relationship becomes important not because it satisfies personality needs but because it’s the pathway to wholeness.
Character | Important | Life | Life | Meaning | Personality | Receive | Relationship | Surrender | Wholeness | Learn |
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
Wisdom |
Relationship as a path leads us on a journey of the heart - which involves becoming more fully human, more available to life as a whole. Intimate relationships are ideally suited as this kind of path because they inspire our heart to open, while at the same time showing us where we are most stuck.
Character | Heart | Journey | Life | Life | Relationship | Time |
A complete moral philosophy would tell us how and why we should act and feel towards others in relationships of shifting and varying power asymmetry and shifting and varying intimacy.
Philosophy | Power | Wisdom |
The future of religion is connected with the possibility of developing a faith in the possibilities of human experience and human relationships that will create a vital sense of the solidarity of human interests and inspire action to make that sense a reality.
Action | Experience | Faith | Future | Reality | Religion | Sense | Will | Wisdom |
True belonging is born of relationships not only to one another but to a place of shared responsibilities and benefits. We love not so much what we have acquired as what we have made and whom we have made it with.
Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
An elementary particle is not an independently existing, unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.
Wisdom |
Lives can be changed if you say the right thing at the right time at the right place with the right spirit… Words of encouragement, spoken or written, have a dramatic effect on a person…Well-intended words, even though they are correct, can damage relationships if they are not perceived as being offered with good will.
The best and the deepest moral training is that which one gets by having to enter into proper relationships with others… Present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
A nonviolent revolution is not a program of “seizure of power.” It is a program of transformation of relationships ending in a peaceful transfer of power.
Power | Revolution |
Life learns how to exploit and control its environment by perceiving, investigating, understanding, then utilizing the relationships that exist between objects and events. This is possible because the universe is causally constructed.
Control | Events | Exploit | Life | Life | Understanding | Universe |