This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you.
Body | Eccentricity | Life | Life | Malice | Mystery | Poetry | Understand |
Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
Body |
Lucy Maud Montgomery, aka Maud or L.M. Montgomery
I am well in body although considerable rumpled up in spirit, thank you ma'am.
Body |
The idea that we are “stewards of the earth” is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body’s physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? . . . Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries? . . . We are unconscious of most of our body’s processes, thank goodness, because we’d screw it up if we weren’t. The human body is so complex, with so many parts... The idea that we are consciously caretaking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.
Body | Enough | System | Understand |
Lucy Maud Montgomery, aka Maud or L.M. Montgomery
The body grows slowly and steadily but the soul grows by leaps and bounds. It may come to its full stature in an hour.
Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.
Body | Commerce | Slavery | Understanding | Commerce |
It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
Pain is either an evil for the body - and if so, let the body state its case - or for the soul; but the soul can maintain its own unclouded calm, and refuse to view it as an evil.
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
The time of human life is but a point, and the substance is a flux, and its perceptions dull, and the composition of the body corruptible, and the soul a whirl, and fortune inscrutable, and fame a senseless thing…. What then is there which can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.
When you contemplate the body by being within the body, you should not engage in all sorts of ideas about it; the same when you contemplate feelings by being within feelings, you should enter in without ideas; the same applies to contemplating the mind by being within the mind and contemplating thoughts by being within thoughts. The thoughts should be just the objects of mind and you should not apply yourself to any train of ideas connected with them. In this way, by putting ideas aside, your mind will become tranquil and fixed on one point. It will then enter into a meditation that is without discursive thought and is rapturous and joyful.
Body | Feelings | Ideas | Meditation | Mind | Thought | Will | Thought |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
It is a shameful thing for the soul to faint while the body still perseveres.
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.
Baseness | Body | Enemy | Government | Soul | Traitor | Treason | Government |
Animals awaken, first facially, then bodily. Men's bodies wake up before their faces do. The animal sleeps within its body; man sleeps with his body in his mind.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction. For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire that owed their inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them.
Body | Death | Desire | Inspiration | Love | Past | Power | Time | Will |
The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse.
Body work must be approached with the same respect and attentiveness that one gives to dreams. The body has a wisdom of its own. However slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence and total support to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative, dammed energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in.
Absolute | Attentiveness | Body | Confidence | Energy | Knowing | Mind | Respect | Wisdom | Work | Respect |
This is the point where love becomes possible. We see the other with the eye of the heart, an eye not clouded by fear manifesting as need, jealousy, possessiveness, or manipulation. With the unclouded eye of the heart, we can see the other as other. We can rejoice in the other, challenge the other, and embrace the other without losing our own center or taking anything away from the other. We are always other to each other — soul meeting soul, the body awakened with joy. To love unconditionally requires no contracts, bargains, or agreements. Love exists in the moment-to-moment flux of life.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
A great soul, with a great purpose, can make a weak body strong and keep it so.
Body |
The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.
Body |