This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
To reach the depths of the beauty of our souls in our close relationships, we must be prepared to walk into the dark side of intimacy and out the other side into the light. Our most meaningful relationships are based on what we are capable of becoming, rather than on what we have been or what we are, on our longing for expansion rather than our preoccupation with comfort and security.
Beauty | Character | Comfort | Light | Longing | Security | Beauty |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, which charm at first sight, and lend on to further intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there by anything in our character worthy of imitation.
Beauty | Body | Character | Courtesy | Example | Grace | Imitation | Science | Time | Instruction | Beauty |
Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
Those who are unacquainted with the world take pleasure in the intimacy of great men; those who are wiser dread the consequences.
When you remember your dreams, you remember your Self, your hidden wounds, fears, desires and joys... When you explore you dreams, you begin to make yourself whole: you take back the powerful feelings of grief, rage, and love that you've denied or avoided. When you share your dreams, you are sharing deeply personal feelings that create bonds of intimacy and help you receive the love and support needed to heal and grow at times of change.
Change | Dreams | Feelings | Grief | Love | Rage | Receive | Self | Wisdom |
Robert Sternberg, fully Robert Jeffrey Sternberg
Relationships work because of a balance between intimacy and independence.
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, pen name Amanda Cross
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward
It takes courage to experience the freedom that comes with autonomy, courage to accept intimacy and directly encounter other persons, courage to take a stand in an unpopular cause, courage to choose authenticity over approval and to choose it again and again, courage to accept the responsibility for your own choices, and, indeed, courage to be the unique person you really are.
Authenticity | Cause | Courage | Experience | Freedom | Responsibility | Unique | Approval |
Respect is not carried in great, bold proclamations, but in small moments of surprising intimacy and empathy.
It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.
Death | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Observation |
Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli NULL
Every believer in this world of ours must be a spark of light, a center of love, a vivifying leaven amidst his fellowmen, and he will be all this more perfectly the more closely he lives in communion with God and in the intimacy of his own soul.
Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL
Beware of covetousness, which is a malady, diseaseful, incurable. Intimacy with it is impossible, it makes the sweet friend bitter, it alienates the trusted one from his master, it makes father and mother mad… it divorces a man’s wife.
Intimacy - the willing revelation of self and absorption in another is a rare thing... those who do tend to view it as a fait accompli rather than as a communal being in need of constant renewal... True intimacy is a human constant... Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together of attention and release of energy.
Attention | Energy | Love | Need | Revelation | Self | Work |
We are drawn into intimacy by possibilities rather than by realities, by the promise of things to come rather than by proven accomplishments, and perhaps by seductions that are darker than the bright reasons to which we admit.
Promise |
Obsessive, but not genuine self-love leaves no room for intimacy with another.
Eric Berne, born as Leonard Bernstein
Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.
There are four dimensions of religious existence, four necessary components of man’s relationships to God: (1) the teaching, the essentials of which are summarized in the form of a creed, which serve as guiding principles in our thinking about matters temporal or eternal, the dimension of the doctrine; (b) faith, inwardness, the direction of one’s heart, the intimacy of religion, the dimension of privacy; (c) the law, or the sacred act to be carried out in the sanctuary in society or at home, the dimension of the deed; (d) the context in which creed, faith, and ritual come to pass, such as the community or the covenant, history, tradition, the dimension of transcendence.
Principles | Sacred | Society | Thinking | Society |