This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even-the French air clears up the brain and does good-a world of good.
Action | Baseness | Circumstances | Existence | Good | Laziness | Longing | Nothing |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Belief | Body | Courage | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Opportunity | Past | Reality | Talking | Will | World |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing, I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. I am the swathed figure in the hairdresser's shop taking up only so much space.
Action | Contempt | Harm | Men | Thought | Thought | Understand |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Belief | Body | Children | Courage | Determination | Effort | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Need | Opportunity | Past | Poverty | Power | Reality | Talking | Will | World | Worth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, the falling fountains of the pendant trees. I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw with me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
In the beginning there were two primal spirits, twins spontaneously active, these are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Have you ever been nice to someone in order to keep him in your life, only to see him suddenly turn against you? Being nice to someone, pleasing him, has no influence whatever in changing his nature from bad to good. It is useless and unnecessary to try to change others, for nature-change must include self-change. You will never again waste your days or be betrayed if you remember that you have no real need for a harmful or sour man or woman.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Whether a person is aware of it or not, he is assaulted constantly by misleading and hostile voices within the mind. They speak both through you and to you. Everyone is their target, but because of their extreme cunning, few people ever detect and dismiss them. So the only problem is a lack of information about these foreign voices. The curing facts are as close as your desire for them. It is extremely important for you to remember the following truth: these hurtful voices are not you, and they do not belong to you, but merely speak through your psychic system. Don’t take them as being your own voices, any more than you take radio voices as being your own. They simply use unaware human beings. Your true nature has nothing to do with them. When finally dismissing these sinister speakers you make room for spiritual health and true life.
There is no judge so searching as conscience conducting its own trial.
Action | Consequences |
Need is a low door which, when we must by stern necessity pass through, forces the greatest to bend down the most.
Courage | Perseverance |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology homeostasis, i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
Body | Cause | Courage | Death | Hope | Mind | Will | Loss | Understand |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future - sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.
Action | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Problems | Responsibility | Right | Think |
All good, intellectual people come together at one place and try to bring harmony by means of exchange of thoughts and ideas. When all of them unite they progress rapidly and attain their aims. The external forces cannot harm them in any way.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these things are things that cannot inspire envy.
Action | Change | Contemplation | Destiny | Fate | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Means | Opportunity | Problems | Responsibility | Right | Suffering | Teach | Unique | Will | Fate | Contemplation | Learn | Think |
May we be blessed with the wealth of maximum capabilities. May we be blessed by the sermon of divine knowledge leading to our progress.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.