This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Look at our present life circumstances, whatever they may be, as the raw material of our learning... We must stop regarding ourselves as victims of circumstances, and start to acknowledge that we are not here purely by accident. The master within is trying to help us wake up by confronting us with our current life situation, which contains all the lessons we need to learn in order to grow into more fully developed human beings.
Accident | Character | Circumstances | Learning | Life | Life | Need | Order | Present | Learn |
There are pauses amidst study, and even pauses of seeming idleness, in which a process goes on which may be likened to the digestion of food. In those seasons of repose, the powers are gathering their strength for new efforts; as land which lies fallow recovers itself for tillage.
Never expect justice from a vain man; if he has the negative magnanimity not to disparage you, it is the most you can expect.
Justice | Magnanimity | Man | Wisdom |
The super-businessmen have to a large extent failed to see that the need for morality in the people they practically govern is greater than ever, because social relations are infinitely more delicate and complex in adjustment than heretofore.
Awareness of the inevitability of death need not cause sadness. Rather we can use it to destroy the common worries about inconsequential aspects of life. Many worries are over matters that have no lasting value. When you overcome worry, your mind will be free to think of your ultimate goals in life.
Awareness | Cause | Character | Death | Destroy | Goals | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Sadness | Will | Worry | Think |
Tzu-Ssu or Zisi, born Kong Ji NULL
Sincerity is the fulfillment of our own nature, and to arrive at it we need only follow our true self. Sincerity is the beginning and end of existence; without it, nothing can endure. Therefore the mature person values sincerity above all things.
Beginning | Character | Existence | Fulfillment | Nature | Need | Nothing | Self | Sincerity |
Robert C. Winthrop,fully Robert Charles Winthrop
Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise, - all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.
Character | Dignity | Education | Ignorance | Justice | Slavery | Wisdom |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
Justice is unstable and changeable? No, but the times over which justice presides are not alike, for they are times.
J. L. Austin, fully John Langshaw Austin
Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers.
One need remain in hell no longer than he chooses to; and the moment he chooses not to remain longer, not all the powers in the universe can prevent his leaving it. One can rise to any heaven he himself chooses; and when he chooses so to rise, all the higher powers of the universe combine to help him heavenward.
The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the Government or majorities think an individual is right, no one will interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered holy, or when radicals criticise, or satirize the political gods, or question the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war, how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are called to suppress the free expression of thought.
Character | Government | Individual | Justice | Question | Right | Will | Wisdom | World | Wrong | Government | Old | Think |
Sharing is the great and imperative need of our time. An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen but greatens his life, especially if sharing be done not formally nor conventionally, but rather with such heartiness as springs out of an understanding of the meaning of the religion of sharing.
Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Need | Religion | Time | Understanding |
Margaret Young, born Margaret Youngblood
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
The living need charity more than the dead.
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
Philosophy... consists in keeping the demon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor feeling the need of another man’s doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind.
Death | Man | Mind | Need | Nothing | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Waiting | Wisdom |