This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Do what you will, withdraw to the mountains, sit in a forest, you cannot live in isolation. You can live only in relationship, and as long as relationship is not understood, there can be no right action. Right action comes in understanding relationship, which reveals the process of oneself. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, it is a field of affection, warmth, and love, therefore a field rich with flowers.
Action | Beginning | Relationship | Right | Self-knowledge | Understanding |
Right thinking alone can bring about right action; self-knowledge yields right thinking.
Right | Self-knowledge | Thinking |
To understand yourself is to understand the giver of values. Without understanding yourself, there is no renunciation of the world; without self-knowledge there can be only escape, called renunciation, which gives birth to endless problems and miseries.
Birth | Problems | Self-knowledge | Understanding | Understand |
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
If self-knowledge be a path to virtue, virtue is a much better one to self-knowledge. The more pure the soul becomes, it will, like certain precious stones that are sensible to the contact of poison, shrink from the fetid vapors of evil impressions.
Jean Grou, fully Jean Nicholas Grou
You are surprised at your imperfections, why? I should infer from that, that your self-knowledge is small.
Fear is a question: What are you afraid of and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
Health | Self-knowledge | Afraid |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Say, "I do not want any-thing," and be happy. The continuous realization of the futility of wants will eventually lead you to Knowledge. This Self-knowledge will give you the freedom from wants to the road to abiding happiness.
Freedom | Self-knowledge | Wants | Will |
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Censure | Little | Order | Self-knowledge |
The description of the method that gave me what I had been seeking throughout my life – namely, an approach to self-knowledge by which my own life history would be revealed to me – has by now been published in many languages, so that many people have already been able to help themselves by applying it. This self-therapy method, enacted in four steps, is devoted solely to the truth and therefore dispenses with all mystification and ideology.
History | Life | Life | Method | People | Self-knowledge | Truth |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
For what is faith unless it is to believe what you do not see?
Mind | Self-knowledge | Trial |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Only noise makes mistakes. Silence never makes mistakes.
Self-knowledge | Value |
It is in vain to torment oneself over sufferings that one cannot alleviate.
Men | Self-knowledge |
We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as Andre Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible sufferÂing and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself—least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn't make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.
Comfort | Despair | Destroy | Doubt | Dread | Failure | Ideas | Joy | Life | Life | Little | Man | Reality | Self-knowledge | Sense | Failure |
When rogues go in procession the devil carries the cross.
Important | Self-knowledge | Truths |