This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
No sickness worse than imagining thyself to be perfect can afflict thy soul.
Soul |
William Plomer, fully William Charles Franklyn Plomer
It is the function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new forms--the power to connect the seemingly unconnnected.
He who would take good care of his health should be sparing in his tastes, banish his worries, temper his desires, restrain his emotions, take good care of his vital force, spare his words, regard lightly success and failure, ignore sorrows and difficulties, drive away foolish ambitions, avoid great likes and dislikes, calm his vision and his hearing, and be faithful in his internal regimen. How can one have sickness if he does not tire his spirits and worry his soul? Therefore he would nourish his nature should eat only when he is hungry and not fill himself with food, and he should drink only when he is thirsty and not fill himself with too much drink. He should eat little and between long intervals, and not too much and not too constantly. He should aim at being a little hungry when well-filled, and being a little well-filled when hungry. Being well-filled hurts the lungs and being hungry hurts the flow of vital energy.
Care | Emotions | Energy | Failure | Force | Good | Health | Little | Nature | Regard | Soul | Success | Temper | Vision | Words | Worry |
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher
The whole of religion is nothing but the sum of all relations of man to God, apprehended in all the possible ways in which any man can be immediately conscious in his life. In this sense there is but one religion, for it would be but a poverty-stricken and halting life, if all these relations did not exist wherever religion ought to be.
God | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Poverty | Religion | Sense |
The underlying sickness of human life is an unwillingness to look with open eyes at the condition of the world.
In sickness the soul begins to dress herself for immortality.
Immortality | Soul |
How could sufferings be relieved through purification? To know the Path is to get lost at the ford. Indeed, sickness comes from worldly love and poverty begins with the pursuit of greed.
There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what is does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of being. It is this assumption that I call scientific materialism. Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situations at which we have now arrived.
Challenge | Materialism | Nature | Space | Following |
Virtue consists in doing our duty in the several relations we sustain in respect to ourselves, to our fellow-men, and to God, as known from reason, conscience and revelation.
Conscience | Duty | God | Men | Reason | Respect | Revelation | Virtue | Virtue | Respect |
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
People |
A living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvelous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism. There are no forces opposed and struggling one with another; in nature there can be only order and disorder, harmony or discord... Sickness and death are merely a dissolution or disturbance of the mechanism which regulates the contact of vital stimulants with organic units.
Death | Harmony | Means | Nature | Nothing | Order | Organic |
Loneliness is not the sickness unto death. No, but can it be cured except by death? And does it not become the harder to bear the closer one comes to death?
Death | Loneliness |
It is not true that the relations between the sexes are of the same order with the rest of man’s instincts. They have social consequences which place them in a class apart.
Consequences | Man | Order | Rest |