This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.
Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.
Circumstances | History |
There is no fact, no detail of our life too sordid for God's intervention. God has seen murder. God has seen rape. God has seen drug addiction's and alcoholism's utter degradation. God is available to us no matter what our circumstances. God can find us in a crack house. God can find us crumpled in a doorway or cowering on a park bench. We need only reach out to discover that God reaches back. We are led a step at a time even when we feel we are alone. Sometimes God talks to us through people. Sometimes God reaches us through circumstances or coincidence. God has a million ways to reach out to us, and when we are open to it, we begin to sense the touch of God coming to us from all directions.
Circumstances | God | Life | Life | Need | Sense | Time | God |
The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbrinding, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.
Change | Circumstances | Doctrine | Men |
There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.
The people and circumstances around me do not make me what I am, they reveal who I am.
Circumstances | People |
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
Men's plans should be regulated by the circumstances, not circumstances by the plans.
All of these individuals may be unaware that the "wiring" of a child's brain simply is not in sync with the demands of the situations at hand. Telling a student "You can do better" doesn't help particularly when he has done his best to no avail. Criticizing him for an inability to complete a particular task in a particular way, similarly, is ineffective -not to mention inappropriate. And humiliating him inadvertently, in private or in public, for circumstances beyond his control is simply hurtful and unnecessary.
Circumstances | Control |
In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away...past, present, and future together.
Circumstances | Future | Tragedy |
Deeper than men’s opinions are the sentiment and circumstances by which opinion is predetermined.
Circumstances | Opinion | Sentiment |
If thou art master to thyself, circumstances shall harm thee little.
Art | Circumstances | Harm | Art |
What's difficult in life is to stay centered when somebody does or says something that tempts us to close our hearts because their heart was closed. That is hard. But that is also how we grow. We go through those circumstances in order to evolve into people who can hold to our loving center no matter what the world throws us.
Circumstances | Heart | Life | Life | Order | People | World |
The very good news is there is quite a number of internal circumstances [...] under your voluntary control. If you decide to change them (and be warned that none of these changes come without real effort), your level of happiness is likely to increase lastingly.
Change | Circumstances | Good | News | Happiness |
AN INSPIRED LIFE: I HAVE A CHOICE. My key to living an inspired life involves Embracing my history, Understanding the function of expectations and gently learning to have none; Recognizing the power of attentive and conscious choices. In all circumstances I acknowledge this, IN ALL THINGS AND ALL WAYS, I HAVE CHOICE. My choice resides in my perspective. While I certainly do not control climate and markets and roadways and others, I do control myself and my response to all those circumstances. I do indeed.
Choice | Circumstances | Control | Learning | Life | Life | Power |
The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.
Attention | Challenge | Circumstances | Law | Necessity | Reform |
It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape. After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story.
Character | Circumstances | Error | Love | Man | Story | Woman |
I do believe that every individual should be free to own, buy, and sell gold. If under those circumstances a private gold standard emerged, fine—although I make a scientific prediction that it’s very unlikely. But I think those people who say they believe in a gold standard are fundamentally being very anti-libertarian because what they mean by a gold standard is a governmentally fixed price for gold.
Circumstances | Gold | Individual | People | Prediction | Price | Think |
Ambition never is in a greater hurry that I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.
Circumstances | Hurry |
If grasping were bondage, then the one who is grasping would not be bound. But one who is not grasping is not bound. In what circumstances will one be bound? ... "I, without grasping, will pass beyond sorrow, And I will attain nirvana," one says. Whoever grasps like this Has a great grasping.
Circumstances | Will |