This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Hirohito, posthumously called Emperor Shōwa or the Shōwa Emperor NULL
Sublime is the moment when the world is at peace and the limitless deep lies bathed in the morning sun.
The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.
Values are goals which behavior strives to realize. Any activity which is oriented toward the accomplishment of some end is a value-oriented activity.
Accomplishment | Behavior | Goals |
The dominant values of activity and productivity, the overwhelming importance of close family ties as well as friendships, the reliance on good health, and now, in old age, the concern with the depletion of one’s life savings and the fear of senility and dependence are commonly held attitudes…
Age | Dependence | Family | Fear | Good | Health | Life | Life | Old age | Old |
Prayer is one human activity where any inner suggestion of triumph, any shy satisfaction is most likely to be false.
Prayer |
One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing.
Art | Beauty | Invention | Need | Novels | Reading | Television | Art | Beauty | Understand |
At particular epochs of their life, [children] reveal an intense and extraordinary interest in certain objects and exercises, which one might look for in vain at a later age… Such attention is not the results of mere curiosity; it is more like a burning passion. A keen emotion first rises from the depths of the unconscious, and sets in motion a marvelous creative activity in contact with the outside world, thus building up consciousness.
Age | Attention | Children | Consciousness | Curiosity | Life | Life | Passion | World |
We are not born in our full development but with a capacity for good an evil; we are begotten as well without virtue as without vice, and before the activity of our own personal will there is nothing in man but what God has stored in him.
Capacity | Evil | God | Good | Man | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new, sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!
The most striking [way in which children respond to external influences] and one that is almost like a magic wand for opening the gate to the normal expression of a child’s natural gifts is activity concentrated on some task that requires movement of the hands guided by the intellect.
When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of being at once excessive and identical with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me.
A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others he is babbling ceaselessly. But there may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent.
Patricia Goldman-Rakic, born Patricia Shoer
The ultimate function of the neurons in the prefrontal cortex is to excite or inhibit activity in other parts of the brain.” In prohibition and shame we excite the most destructive systems and inhibit the creative ones.
Shame |
People who know they are terminally ill often seem to live more meaningfully. Though dying, they somehow are more alive. They cherish each morning and are vividly aware of each day’s passing. They see despair as a self-indulgent waste, and they have no time to waste.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
A religious man is guided in his activity not by the consequences of his action, but by the consciousness of the destination of his life.
Action | Consciousness | Consequences | Life | Life | Man |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness.
Absence | Art | Cruelty | Discipline | Freedom | Ignorance | Inactivity | Lying | Murder | Treachery | War | Weapons | Words | World | Art |