This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
Character | Means | Meditation | Wisdom |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
To know and to serve God, of course, is why we’re here, a clear truth that like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard... Even in time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. If we had no other purpose in life, it would be good enough to simply take care of them and goose them once in a while.
Care | Character | Enough | Focus | God | Good | Greed | Life | Life | People | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Truth |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life. The great enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy and your joy in you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.
Character | Difficulty | Happy | Intelligence | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Service | Success | Happiness |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it.
Character | Existence | Illusion | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | World |
Nonresistance isn’t passive. Passivity suggests powerlessness. But non-resistance is extremely powerful. It means we’re consciously choosing what we wish to empower. Nonresistance is the action of wisdom that assesses a situation and realizes there is nothing to be gained from fighting it.
Georgii Litichevsky Semenovich
Life means love. We are here for love. Only love is real and everything is real thanks to love. We are nomads wandering through illusionary space. How to make it real? Only by destroying limits that separate us from others. No violence, no attempts at escape can help, only love. Too often love is more painful than joyful. The instances of love are much shorter than the periods during which we wait for love to emerge. The meaning of living is mastering the art of waiting.
Art | Character | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Means | Space | Waiting | Art |
We usually view praying due to suffering that the suffering comes because of external situations and hence we have to pray. But this is not correct. The purpose of the suffering was that we should pray. By pouring our hearts to the Almighty, we become closer to Him and the suffering is a tool for our elevation.
If we crave for the goal that is worthy and fitting for man, namely, happiness of life - and this is accomplished by philosophy alone and by nothing else, and philosophy, as I said, means for us desire for wisdom, and wisdom the science of truth in things, and of things some are properly so called, others merely share the name - it is reasonable and most necessary to distinguish and systematize the accidental qualities of things.
Character | Desire | Distinguish | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nothing | Philosophy | Qualities | Science | Truth | Wisdom | Happiness |
Since man is endowed with intelligence and determines his own ends, it is up to him to put himself in tune with the ends necessarily demanded by his nature. This means that there is, by very virtue of human nature, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, is nothing more than that.
Character | Ends | Human nature | Intelligence | Law | Man | Means | Nature | Nothing | Order | Reason | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Lying is an ugly vice... Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society. It is the only instrument by means of which our wills and thoughts communicate, it is the interpreter of our soul. If it fails us, we have no more hold on each other, no more knowledge of each other. If it deceives us, it breaks up all our relations and dissolves all the bonds of our society.
Character | Knowledge | Lying | Means | Society | Soul | Ugly | Understanding | Wills | Words |