This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Every one must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
The paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is not inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.
Chance | Contentment | Desire | Goals | Life | Life | Paradox | People | Pleasure | Present | Struggle |
There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; there is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite love the benefit.
Our own opinion of ourselves should be lower than that formed by others, for we have a better chance at our imperfections.
A little gleam of time between two eternities; no second chance to us forever more.
Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
Chance |
Are we no greater than the noise we make along one blind atomic pilgrimage whereon by crass chance billeted we go because our brains and bones and cartilage will have it so?
Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven — the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it — it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition — make haste — oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
Affectation | Chance | Haste | Heart | Indulgence | Reverence | Sense | Story | Strength | Sympathy | Trust |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion.
Time is not measured by the years that you live but by the deeds that you do and the joy that you give. And each day as it comes brings a chance to each one to love to the fullest, leaving nothing undone that would brighten the life or lighten the load Of some weary traveler lost on Life's Road. So what does it matter how long we may live if as long as we live we unselfishly give.
Chance | Day | Deeds | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Nothing | Deeds |
Our thesis is that quantum mechanics leaves our body, our brain, at any moment in a state with numerous (because of its complexity we might say innumerable) possible futures, each with a predetermined probability. Freedom involves two components: chance (existence of a genuine set of alternatives) and choice. Quantum mechanics provides the chance, and we shall argue that only the mind can make the choice by selecting (not energetically enforcing) among the possible future courses.
The existence of man, indeed of the entire universe, has long been regarded as a miracle, incomprehensible without assuming the existence of a Creator who is omnipotent and omniscient. British astronomer Fred Hoyle is noted for the statement that believing the first cell (in the universe) originated by mere chance is like believing a tornado ripping through a junkyard full of airplane parts could produce a Boeing 747. God created the universe out of nothing in an act which also brought time into existence. Recent discoveries, such as observations supporting the big Bang and similar astronomical phenomena, are wholly compatible with this view.
Chance | Existence | God | Nothing | Time | Universe | God |
Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the 'prebiotic soup.'