This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Can art be completely invented? It’s a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination.
Art | Imagination | Reality | Art |
Elderly Men... have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They ‘think,’ but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefor suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but... love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love. They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive... They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past... Old men may feel pity, as well as young men, but not for the same reason. Young men feel it out of kindness; old men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls anyone else might easily happen to them.
Business | Day | Evil | Experience | Future | Hate | Hope | Kindness | Life | Life | Little | Love | Memory | Men | Nothing | Past | Pity | Reason | Weakness | Will | Old |
Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on man’s rights; he will rather have regard for everyone, forgive everyone, help everyone as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.
Compassion | Conduct | Guarantee | Harm | Justice | Kindness | Man | Regard | Rights | Will | Forgive |
[Man’s] self-conscious existence as man forces on him a choice of uses for his faculties... This choice is what is called free will. Free will, therefore, not only a prerogative but an obligation for man. Free will thus understood, has nothing to do with destiny. It is a power which man is compelled by his own nature to use, whether the use he makes of it is predestined or not... the responsibility of deciding rests with me just the same whether the outcome is predetermined or not. If it is predetermined, it is my own past habit-forming and character-forming decisions in this and previous lifetimes which have predetermined it; and this decision in its turn will help to condition my mind, thus determining future ones.
Character | Choice | Decision | Destiny | Existence | Free will | Future | Habit | Man | Mind | Nature | Nothing | Obligation | Past | Power | Responsibility | Self | Will |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
The regular social progress though which a growing society advances from one stage in its growth to another is a compound movement in which a creative individual or minority first withdraws from the common life of the society, then works out, in seclusion, a solution for some problem with which the society as a whole is confronted, and finally re-enters into communion with the rest of society in order to help it forward on its road by imparting to it the results of the creative work which the temporarily secluded individual or minority has accomplished during the interval between withdrawal and return.
Growth | Individual | Life | Life | Order | Progress | Rest | Seclusion | Society | Work | Society |
If a person measures his spiritual fulfillment in terms of cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to know much spiritual fulfillment. If, however, he measures it in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child’s smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment.
Better | Day | Ecstasy | Fulfillment | Mind | Peace | Smile |
Our Creator has given us five senses to help us survive threats from the external world, and a sixth sense, our healing system, to help us survive internal threats.
Life is so mysterious. People are in misery, and they don’t know how to get out, get help or free themselves. Life is total freedom, but we’re trapped in our own civilization, culture, religion, teachings. We’re equipped with fear, ignorance, unhappiness. Desire is the big evil, the big temptation. Many people carry on in life without knowing this. We do so much for our bodies but not for our souls. Pay attention to yourself, monitor your thinking and capture the villains within. Know what it is in you that would make people suffer more, make people suffer less. Know this and you know how to use your thinking and abilities to bring peace. Certain people have certain duties, a talent. The meaning of life is to see this mission, fulfill it and make the maximum use of your life and your benefit and mankind’s.
Attention | Civilization | Culture | Desire | Evil | Fear | Freedom | Ignorance | Knowing | Life | Life | Mankind | Meaning | Mission | Peace | People | Religion | Temptation | Thinking | Unhappiness |
Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington
Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon them and to let them know that you trust them.
Individual | Responsibility | Trust |
A book can give greater riches than any; other form of recreation but it cannot provide the last answers. They must be found in the loneliness of a man's own mind. Books can help a man be ready for those moments. But neither books nor teachers can provide the answers.
Books | Loneliness | Man | Mind | Recreation | Riches | Riches |
Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.
Individual | Responsibility | Trust |
I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstance and is not the creature of accidental impulse, and which discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the Infinite Spirit, and in them finds help to its own spiritual enlargement.
Impulse | Mind | Spirit | Circumstance |
The happiness of ordinary persons seems to me to consist in slavishly following the majority, as if they could not help it.
Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, and you cannot help but be successful.
People |