This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
By separating the knower from the known, writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set. Writing makes possible the great introspective religious traditions such as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of these have sacred texts.
Mind | Possessions | Sense | Sound | Space | Words | World | Think |
When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
Human nature | Nature | Possessions |
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
[The duty to do good to others] rests upon the fact that there are other beings in the world whose condition we can make better in respect of virtue, or of intelligence, or of pleasure.
Abundance | Possessions | Receive | Will |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
Business | Change | Death | Life | Life | Nature | Possessions | Time | Business |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity ; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness—that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only explanation available. The story of the hero who slays the devouring dragon was not merely a symbol of day and night, of summer and winter; it was a literal explanation of the phenomena, it was the science of early times.
Possessions | Reputation | Space |
The sound of drums sounds nicely from far away. (People are never satisfied with what they have.)
There are two kinds of error: blind credulity and piecemeal criticism. Never believe a word without putting its truth to the test; discernment does not grow in laziness; and this faculty of discernment is indispensable to the Seeker. Sound skepticism is the necessary condition for good discernment; but piecemeal criticism is an error.
Husband | Love | Possessions | Woman |
The law of attraction is most understood when you see yourself as a magnet getting more and more of the way you FEEL.
Achievement | Attainment | Body | Joy | Money | Possessions | Property | Success |