This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani
What is the meaning of life? The meaning may not be expressed in words. It transcends the mind and the intellect. The meaning is to be experienced, realized... It is open to everyone who would live according to certain disciplines... The discipline of duty. Life is a field of duty, not a dance of desires... The discipline of service... We are here to help others... The opposite of love is not hate but apathy... The discipline of silence... The meaning of life is to love God and to give the service of love to the suffering children of God. And to the birds and animals who are God’s children as well.
Apathy | Character | Children | Discipline | Duty | God | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Mind | Service | Silence | Suffering | Words | God |
Franz Boas, fully Franz Uri Boas
The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.
Ancestry | Behavior | Character | Individual | Wisdom |
Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
In the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.
Discipline | Freedom | Wisdom |
Be more prudent for your children than perhaps you have been for yourself. When they, too, are parents they will imitate you, and each of you will have prepared happy generations who will transmit, together with your memory, the worship of your wisdom.
Children | Happy | Memory | Parents | Will | Wisdom | Worship |
Live more closely to the rhythms of nature... To keep our priorities straight, it is helpful to live more deliberately, with enough discipline to evoke and sustain a sensitivity to the inner life. To honor the rhythms and requirements of your life, be sure that the pattern you adopt is organic and flexible, rather than arbitrary and artificial... Live each day mindfully. Spiritual life requires no strongman acts, no glittering achievements or spectacular successes, but it does require passionate fidelity to the hundred little things of mundane life.
Day | Discipline | Enough | Fidelity | Honor | Life | Life | Little | Nature | Organic | Wisdom |
Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.
Ability | Discipline | Experience | Knowledge | Mind | Time | Wisdom | Work |
Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents.
Attainment | Education | History | Parents | Time | Will | Wisdom |
Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.
Consequences | Courage | Discipline | Effort | Past | Present | Wisdom |
I believe that the political significance of the problem of sex is due to the fact that sex is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the population.
Body | Control | Discipline | Wisdom |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
To be sure, if it is the purpose of educators to stifle the child’s power of independent thought as early as possible, in order to produce that ‘good behavior’ which is so highly prized, they cannot do better than deceive children in sexual matters and intimidate them by religious means. The stronger characters will, it is true, withstand these influences; they will become rebels against the authority of their parents and later against every other form of authority. When children do not receive the explanations for which they turn to their elders, they go on tormenting themselves in secret with the problem, and produce attempts at solution in which the truth they have guessed is mixed up in the most extraordinary way with grotesque inventions; or else they whisper confidences to each other which, because of the sense of guilt in the youthful inquirers, stamp everything sexual as horrible and disgusting.
Authority | Behavior | Better | Children | Good | Guilt | Means | Order | Parents | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Receive | Sense | Thought | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Thought |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Things as they are are changed when we demonstrate a new reality. A very small change in perception can result in a change in behavior and, cumulatively, in a very large change in cultural patterns. Our purpose and destiny are encoded within us. But they do not automatically propel us to the next act in our day, let alone the next stage in our evolution. Our Fourth Instinct allows us to see that next stage, and our free will enables us to act on it so that it can become a reality.
Behavior | Change | Day | Destiny | Evolution | Free will | Instinct | Perception | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Will | Wisdom |
George Mogridge, aka "Old Humphrey"
How can man be intelligent, happy, or useful, without the culture and discipline of education? It is this that unlocks the prison-house of his mind, and releases the captive.
Culture | Discipline | Education | Happy | Man | Mind | Prison | Wisdom |
One of the most valuable habits a parent can have is that of explaining. Many parents think their children are too young to understand explanations, yet it is surprising how much a child will absorb if he is given a chance. And even if he does not understand completely, he will at least sense that someone cares enough to explain
Chance | Children | Enough | Parents | Sense | Will | Wisdom | Child | Parent | Think | Understand |
All the philosophy... in the world and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behavior different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life.
Behavior | Conduct | Experience | Life | Life | Nothing | Philosophy | Religion | Will | Wisdom | World |