This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.
Achievement | Ecstasy | Force | Labor | Time | Will | Wise | Work |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill-usage.
Achievement | Darkness | Existence | History | Human nature | Individual | Nature | Religion | Research | Science | Thought | Time | World | Thought |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.
Achievement | Aesthetic | Important | Life | Life | Means | Work |
Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
The great hope is that after all these long centuries of wandering, Christianity may return to its home and its heritage and there find once again the precious things it lost so tragically – and so soon.
Achievement | History | People | Time | Work |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Tell the funny story on yourself so that the laugh is on you; always laugh with others never at them.
Achievement | Work |
No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as “God,” “Natural Law,” “Cosmic Primordial Force,” “Ether” or “Cosmic Orgone Energy.”
Achievement | Culture | Instinct | Man | Morality | Time | Unity | Will | Work |
All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.
Achievement | People |
A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air.
Achievement | Will | Following |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Thought is nested in speech, not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound. What the reader is seeing on this page are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound.
Achievement | Age | Attention | Present | Sense | Tyranny | World |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
The problem with commodities is that you are betting on what someone else would pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn’t going to do anything for you… it is an entirely different game to buy a lump of something and hope that somebody else pays you more for that lump two years from now than it is to buy something that you expect to produce income for you over time.
Achievement | Equity |
It is, indeed, the season of regenerated feeling--the season for kindling, not merely the fire of hospitality in the hall, but the genial flame of charity in the heart.
Achievement | Popularity | Trials |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
The more you see yourself as what you'd like to become, and act as if what you want is already there, the more you'll activate those dormant forces that will collaborate to transform your dream into your reality.
Achievement | Failure | Greatness | Learning | People | Teach | Failure |
W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone
Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success or are they holding you back?
Achievement | Adversity | Desire | Mind | Words | Trouble | Learn |
Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left...
Achievement | Mankind |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic the self-transcendence of human existence. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
Achievement | Dignity | Happy | Inconsistency | Man | People | Present | Sense | Society | Usefulness | Society | Old | Value |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Achievement | Change | Guilt | Opportunity | Optimism | Reason | Suffering | Tragedy |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Take the fate of the sick--especially those who are incurable. I once read a letter written by a young invalid, in which he told a friend that he had just found out he would not live for long, that even an operation would be of no help. He wrote further that he remembered a film he had seen in which a man was portrayed who waited for death in a courageous and dignified way. The boy had thought it a great accomplishment to meet death so well. Now--he wrote--fate was offering him a similar chance.
Achievement | Men |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Achievement | Angels | Belief | Contemplation | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Nothing | Poetry | Position | Right | Salvation | Thought | Time | Truth | Wisdom | World | Contemplation | Thought | Understand |