This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We are called upon to love in faith – to nurse our firm belief in the stars of sweet reasonableness that continue to shine behind the darkness of events which seem to us our and grim beyond our understanding." - Karl Rahner
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." - Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter
"Certain signs precede certain events." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"As the greatest single social influence during the formative years, schools have been the instruments of our greatest denial, unconsciousness, conformity, and broken connections. Just as allopathic medicine treats symptoms without concern for the whole system, schools break knowledge and experience into “subjects,” relentlessly turning wholes into parts, flowers into petals, history into events, without ever restoring continuity... Worse yet, not only the mind is broken, but too often, so is the spirit. Allopathic teaching produces the equivalent of iatrogenic, or doctor-caused” illness - teacher-caused learning disabilities. We might call these pedogenic illnesses. The child who may have come to school intact, with the budding courage to risk and explore, finds stress enough to permanently diminish that adventure." - Marilyn Ferguson
"Purpose, resolution and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience. Whoever achieves this state will never really lack anything else. A person whose consciousness is so ordered need not fear unexpected events, or even death. Every living moment will make sense, and most of it will be enjoyable." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Without a central administrative focus, foreign policy turns into a series of unrelated decisions – crisis-oriented, ad hoc and after-the-fact in nature. We become prisoners of events." - Nelson Rockefeller, fully Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller
"A person who reads and studies and converses on current events in science, philosophy, political will, in the process, escape from the dull self-centeredness, and his participatory awareness of life in its infinite vitality will tend to produce the excitement which is inherent in happiness. Unfortunately, thinking the interesting thoughts which create happiness is a disciplinary process which too few people employ." - Norman Vincent Peale
"The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret. Great passions are for great souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"Time does not exist! There exist no perpetual and eternal appearance and disappearance of phenomena, no ceaselessly flowing fountain of ever-appearing and ever-vanishing events. Everything exists always! There is only one eternal present, the Eternal Now, which the weak and limited human mind can never grasp and conceive. But the idea of the Eternal Now is not at all the idea of a cold and merciless predetermnation of everything, of an exact and infallible pre-existence." - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky
"In the breadth and depth of its cosmic stuff, in the bewildering number of the elements and events that make it up, and in the wide sweep, too, of the overall currents that dominate it and carry it along as one single great river, the world, filled by God, appears to our enlightened eyes as simply a setting in which universal communion can be attained and a concrete expression of that communion." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"It is perhaps not to be wondered at, since fortune is ever changing her course and time is infinite, that the same incidents should occur many times, spontaneously. For, if the multitude of elements is unlimited, fortune has in the abundance of her material an ample provider of coincidences; and if, on the other hand, there is a limited number of elements from which events are interwoven, the same things must happen many times, being brought to pass by the same agencies. " - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Time is a river of passing events, aye, a rushing torrent." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"Events expand with the character." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and disheveled desolation." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Trust thyself. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that only in our easy, simple spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The most fugitive word or deed, the more air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character, and the remote results of character are civil history and events that shake or settle the world. If you act, you show character; if you sit still, you show it; if you sleep, you show it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is one thing to be moved by events; it is another to be mastered by them." - Ralph Washington Sockman
"Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power... The principal effect of the passions is that they incite and persuade the mind to will the events for which they prepared the body... If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - René Descartes
"Every person, all the events of your life are drawn there because you have them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"We do not know how to predict what will happen in a given circumstance. The only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events. We can only predict the odds." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. n." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"The person of integrity is a continuous person, for whom the present is a point on a line drawn out of memory and into the willed future, rather than an unpredicted and unwieldy configuration which seems to operate under its own law. The person of integrity is no superman; he will be, from time to time, defeated, frustrated, embarrassed and completely surprised. but neither is he the common and regular dupe of circumstance, compelled (like some tourist with a pocket dictionary) to consult conscience and emotion at each new turn of events." - Robert Grudin
"The conception of time as an objective blank in which particularly events… succeed one after another has completely been discarded. The Buddha… knows no time-continuity; the past and the future are both rolled up into this present moment of illumination." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
"There never is any duality. The principle of awareness, Atman, never engages in any activity, although from this pure principle alone, the luminous, transparent, insubstantial universe spontaneously unfolds. When the practitioner is consciously identified, not with any expression of awareness but with the living principle of awareness... there remains no sense of intrinsic involvement with polarities such as good and evil, virtue and vice, self and other, existence and nonexistence. However, when one identifies with activity rather than with principle, manifesting an ego that claims to generate various chains of events, then the tensions between polar opposites split that person’s consciousness, creating various forms of obvious and subtle suffering." -
"Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity." - Thomas Moore
"True conversation is an interpenetration of worlds, a genuine intercourse of souls, which doesn’t have to be self-consciously profound but does have to touch matters of concern to the soul... Conversation may also relive us from the pressures of everyday activity and decision-making, opening us up to undisclosed levels of our experience. Soul resides in the overtones and undertones, not in the flat body of literal events. Conversation performs a pleasurable and gentle alchemy on experience, sublimating it into forms that can be examined. Experience itself takes wing from conversation... Conversation is the sex act of the soul, and as such it is supremely conducive to the cultivation of intimacy." - Thomas Moore
"To live with a high degree of artfulness means to attend to the small things that keep the soul engaged in whatever we are doing, and it is the very heart of soul making. From some grand overview of life, it may seem that only the big events are ultimately important. But to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparent insignificance." - Thomas Moore
"Regardless of how you have viewed events in the past, you have the ability to learn to view things with a calm and peaceful attitude. Instead of looking at events and situations as overwhelming, you can look at them as interesting and challenging experiences. Give up your demands of how you would have like anything to be and deal with what actually is." - Zelig Pliskin
"Happiness is a skill that can be learned. To acquire this skill it is necessary to master: the ability to focus on happiness-producing thoughts instead of those which cause unhappiness and the ability to evaluate events and situations as positive instead of negative, or at least lower the degree of negativity... The person with greater control over his thoughts will have greater control over his emotions." - Zelig Pliskin
"You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours." - Anne Wilson Schaef
"Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s desire... But we need only penetrate to the essence of any historic event - which lies in the activity of the general mass of men who take part in it - to be convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the actions of the mass but is itself continually controlled. " -
"While physical entities seem to be separate in space and time, they are actually linked or unified in an implicit or unifying fashion. Beneath the explicit realm of separate things or events lies an implicit realm of individual wholeness, and this implicit whole connects all things. [paraphrased]" - David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm
"Whatever relationships you have attracted in your life at this moment, are precisely the ones you need in your life at this moment. There is a hidden meaning behind all events, and this hidden meaning is serving your own evolution" - Deepak Chopra
"What is important is not what someone is but what he is waiting for. Not the events of life but its possibilities." - Dorothee Söelle
"The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired." - Stephen Hawking
"There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"The future need not be a repetition of the past. Frequently one is caught by a paucity of imagination which conceives of the future only in terms of rearranging past events or experiences that are already known. Persistent attempts to explain the unknown in terms of what is already known, can lead to blind repetition of unsatisfactory patterns that limit growth and restrict possibilities." - Frances E. Vaughan
"It is our task to inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed differentiation, and to investigate the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifarious forms of human life." - Franz Boas, fully Franz Uri Boas
"The greatest events - are not our noisiest, but our stillest hours. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The central aim of Eastern mysticism is to experience all the phenomena in the world as manifestations of the same ultimate reality. This reality is seen as the essence of the universe, underlying and unifying the multitude of things and events we observe. The Hindus call it Brahman, The Buddhists Dharmakaya (The Body of Being) or Tathata (Suchness) and the Taoists Tao; each affirming that it transcends our intellectual concepts and defies further explanation. This ultimate essence, however, cannot be separated from its multiple manifestations. It is central to the very nature to manifest itself in myriad forms which come into being and disintegrate, transforming themselves into one another without end." - Fritjof Capra
"Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'." - Fritjof Capra
"Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling: if you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in, or out of a door, has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life." -
"Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved." - George Arthur Buttrick