This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark; it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even in the marrow of our bones, and we see it radiate even to the depths of the sky.
Wisdom |
Woe to the intellectual who lets himself fall completely from thought into reverie! He thinks he will rise again easily, and he says that, after all, it is the same thing. An error! Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie its pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be a surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well; of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes. Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. He was a surgeon and had once been an assistant on the staff of a large hospital. So I once tried to get him to smile by describing to him how he would be unable to lose the habits of camp life when he returned to his former work. On the building site (especially when the supervisor made his tour of inspection) the foreman encouraged us to work faster by shouting: 'Action! Action!' I told my friend, 'One day you will be back in the operating room, performing a big abdominal operation. Suddenly an orderly will rush in announcing the arrival of the senior surgeon by shouting, Action! Action!'
Indispensable | Knowledge | Meaning | Nothing | Search | Wisdom | Words |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Achievement | Angels | Belief | Contemplation | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Nothing | Poetry | Position | Right | Salvation | Thought | Time | Truth | Wisdom | World | Contemplation | Thought | Understand |
Bring hither by thy shouts, O lord of wealth, the suitor, bend his mind towards her; turn thou the right side of every agreeable suitor towards (her).
The earth holds the fool and holds the wise, endures that good and bad dwell (upon her); she keeps company with the boar, gives herself up to the wild hog.
By the Grace of the Saints, Nanak has met the Lord; his mind and body are soothed and satisfied.
Grace |
Death is not the merciless that he is made out to be; he is the friend and companion, the teacher, the kindly kinsman, who takes you into his fold and clothes you with the halo of remembrance.
Cultivation | Grace | Learning | Mind | Work |
The devotee keeps his Beloved clasped tightly to his heart. The fools perform devotional worship by showing off; they dance and dance and jump all around, but they only suffer in terrible pain.
By Your Grace, I obtained this human body; grant me the Blessed Vision of Your Darshan, O Sovereign Lord King.
Do not tremble in fear but become strong and courageous instead.
Contemplation | Evil | Knowledge | Wisdom | Contemplation |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.