This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We live in a world that trusts logic, and from that commitment we distrust desire; but if we lived in a world that validated desire, we would know how to trust it.
Some authors today argue that romantic love is such an illusion that we need to distrust it and keep our wits about us so that we are not led astray. But warnings like this betray a distrust of the soul. We may need to be cured by love of our attachment to life without fantasy. Maybe one function of love is to cure us of an anemic imagination, a life emptied of romantic attachment and abandoned to reason. Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity.
Distrust | Divinity | Illusion | Imagination | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Need | Reason | Soul | Think |
I believe in work, hard work and long hours of work. Men do not break down from overwork, but from worry and dissipation.
18/40/60 Rule When you're eighteen, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you. When you're forty, you don't give a damn about what anybody thinks of you. When you're sixty, you realize nobody's been thinking about you at all.
Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.
Conversation | Wit | Worry |
It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
Attention is our first duty whenever we want to know what is our second duty. There is no such cause of confusion and worry about what we ought to do, and how to do it, as our unwillingness to bear what God would tell us on that very point.
J. C. Hare (1795-1855) and A. W. Hare
Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him; and, on the other hand, it would portray a sorry want of faith to distrust a friend because he laughs at you. Few men, I believe, are much worth loving in whom there is not something well worth laughing at.
John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
If being wealthy is taken to mean having the means to satisfy one's every want, all but the very poor can become rich as thou at a single stroke of a magician's wand, simply by ceasing to want more than is really necessary for sustaining life. By being content with little and not giving a rap for what the neighbours think, one can attain a very large measure of freedom, shedding care and worry in a trice.
Joe Namath, fully Joseph William Namath, aka Willie Joe and Broadway Joe
I think that at some point in your life you realize you don't have to worry if you do everything you're supposed to do right. Or if not right, if you do it the best you can... what can worry do for you? You are already doing the best you can.
I suspect it was...the old story of the implacable necessity of a man having honour within his own natural spirit. A man cannot live and temper his mettle without such honour. There is deep in him a sense of the heroic quest; and our modern way of life, with its emphasis on security, its distrust of the unknown and its elevation of abstract collective values has repressed the heroic impulse to a degree that may produce the most dangerous consequences.
Abstract | Distrust | Impulse | Man | Mettle | Necessity | Sense | Story | Temper | Old |
Laura Schlesinger, fully Laura Catherine Schlessinger, aka Dr. Laura
Don't worry so much about your self-esteem. Worry more about your character. Integrity is its own reward.
The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.
A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves. Neither vanity nor conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
Distrust |
Margaret J. Wheatley, aka Meg Wheatley
Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes when networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what's possible. This is good news for those of us intent on creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage and commitment that lead to broad-based change.
Cause | Change | Commitment | Courage | Good | Need | News | People | Vision | Will | Work | World | Worry |