This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Circumstances | Man | Men |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
As contemplation [of a work of art or literature] enters upon a more serious stage, the human being is driven by the whole economy of what it is to be man to find opposite himself, in that which he contemplates, a person capable of reacting in turn. This drive is primordial and will not be denied.
Art | Commerce | Education | Individual | Life | Life | Need | Problems | Property | Technology | World | Commerce | Art |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Culture |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
In the printed book, these vague psychic "places" became quite physically and visibly localized. A new noetic world was shaping up, spatially organized. In this new world, the book was less like an utterance, and more like a thing.
Knowledge | Method | Observation | Thought | World | Thought |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
It's like a tapeworm eating at our economic body.
Think |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
It’s simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.
Think |
Science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to merchandise; it is a whoredom of the mind, and so is the art that calls this progress. So is the cowardice that calls it inevitable.
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association and affection.
Property | Work | Think | Understand |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, the photographing of ravens; all the fun under liberty's masterful shadow; to-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician, the beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome; to-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers, the eager election of chairmen by the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle. To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, the walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; to-morrow the bicycle races through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
Man |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The appeal of arithmetic to infants is usually self-evident and recognising unusual mathematical maturity is not difficult. The unjustified fears of some educationists about allowing children to forge ahead, needs discussion and recognition of the need for young mathematicians to work in depth and at speed.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The religion of one age is often the poetry of the next. Around every living and operative faith there lies a region of allegory and of imagination into which opinions frequently pass, and in which they long retain a transfigured and idealised existence after their natural life has died away. They are, as it were, deflected. They no longer tell directly and forcibly upon human actions. They no longer produce terror, inspire hopes, awake passions, or mould the characters of men; yet they still exercise a kind of reflex influence, and form part of the ornamental culture of the age. They are turned into allegories. They are interpreted in a non-natural sense. They are invested with a fanciful, poetic, but most attractive garb. They follow instead of controlling the current of thought, and being transformed by far-fetched and ingenious explanations, they become the embellishments of systems of belief that are wholly irreconcilable with their original tendencies. The gods of heathenism were thus translated from the sphere of religion to the sphere of poetry. The grotesque legends and the harsh doctrines of a superstitious faith are so explained away, that they appear graceful myths foreshadowing and illustrating the conceptions of a brighter day. For a time they flicker upon the horizon with a softly beautiful light that enchants the poet, and lends a charm to the new system with which they are made to blend; but at last this too fades away. Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays, possessing little heat, are expended in creating beauty.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The intellectuals who are accustomed to serving the capitalists and the capitalist state say in order to console themselves: You cannot do without us. But their insolent assumption has no truth in it; educated men are already making their appearance on the side of the people, on the side of the working people, and are helping to break the resistance of the servants of capital.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
If the Congress was a struggle between the Iskra-ist and the anti-Iskra-ist elements, were there no intermediate, unstable elements who vacillated between the two? Anyone at all familiar with our Party and with the picture generally presented by congresses of every kind will be inclined a priori to answer the question in the affirmative.
People |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-colored kins, 'thin arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, big bright mouth_; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
Art | Impression | Lesson | Magic | Pleasure | Present | Unique | Art |
When we come face-to-face with the actualities of human and planetary suffering, what does the powerful moment of truth do to us? Do we retreat into the comforts of theories and defense mechanisms, or are we awakened at the core of our being? Awareness of misery, without defense structures, will naturally lead to action. The heart cannot witness misery without calling the being to action, without activating the force of love. We may not act on a global or national scale; it may be only on a community or neighborhood scale—but act, respond, we must. Social responsibility flowers naturally when we perceive the world without the involvement of the ego-consciousness. When we relate directly to suffering, we are led to understanding and spontaneous action—but when we perceive the world through the ego, we are cut off from direct relationship, from communion that stirs the deepest level of our being.
Action | Awareness | Oneness | Relationship | Sense | Will | Awareness |
Correct diet implies the right quality and quantity as well as the frequency of intake. Eating should be related to appetite. It should not cause any excitement, or emotional disturbance. It should be gone through peacefully and happily. One has to be very alert to see that everything one eats is fully digested. The body should not be burdened with undigested food. The cleanliness of all the internal organs is one of the most important factors of meditation.
Compassion | Decision | Force | Life | Life | Strength | Wholeness |
Today, with the scars of our past failures marring our existence and the fears of the future weighing heavily on our spirits, we can no longer go on with this dangerous game of fragmentation. We can no longer escape the fact that we are all bonded, equal in wholeness. Science and technology have brought each of us into intimate relationship with all others. We are truly a global human family. Yet as a family, we have not learned how to live together in peace, to live without violence and exploitation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell wrote: “Man knows how to fly in the air like a bird, he knows how to swim in water like the fish, but how to live among other human beings, he does not know.”
Acceptance | Consequences | Entertainment | Good | Habit | Inevitable | Injustice | Injustice | Little | Terror | Will |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Neurosis consciously met will eventually weaken and fall away.