This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
Ends | Experience | Nature | Reason |
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Age | Death | Destiny | Dread | Earth | Ends | Enough | Kill | Life | Life | Madness | Man | Music | Old age | Silence | Strength | Time | Tomorrow | Truth | Will | Youth | Youth | Old |
The history of mankind is the history of ideas. For it is ideas, theories, and doctrines that guide human action, determine the ultimate ends men aim at, and the choice of the means employed for the attainment of these ends.
Attainment | Choice | Ends | History | Mankind | Means | Men |
Order I a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid.
Ends |
Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.
The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.
This mystical and messianic Oneness, as I hope I have explained, ends the traditional subject/object distinction, and in so doing ends many if not all of the commandments we associate with traditional Judaism. Judaism’s eschatological fulfilment lies in its ultimate abnegation, since once it has done its task it has no use.
To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one's entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one's life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.
Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies runs with one, walks gravely with another turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame it wounds one, another it kills like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning for there is no force able to resist it.
Means must be subsidiary to ends and to our desire for dignity and value.
As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You life on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here… Death ends a life, not a relationship.
The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.
Neti! Neti! cries the sage of the Upanishads: "No! No! thou art not this; nor art thou that! In other words: you do not belong to the fallen cosmos, as you see it now, you are not necessarily engulfed in this creation; necessarily - that is to say, by virtue of the law of your own being. Now, nature has no true ontological reality; it is, indeed, universal becoming. Every cosmic form, complex and magestic though it may be, ends by disintegrating; the universe itself is periodically reabsorbed by "great dissolutions" (mahapralaya) into the primordial matrix (prakriti).
Art | Ends | Law | Nature | Universe | Virtue | Virtue | Art |
Now and again, it is necessary to seclude yourself among deep mountains and hidden valleys to restore your link to the source of life. Breathe in and let yourself soar to the ends of the universe; breathe out and bring the cosmos back inside. Next, breathe up all fecundity and vibrancy of the earth. Finally, blend the breath of heaven and the breath of earth with your own, becoming the Breath of Life itself.
Inquiry not only begins with wonder, but usually ends with it also.
Ends |
Holiness is of a twofold nature; it begins as a quality of the service rendered to God, but it ends as a reward for such service. It is at first a type of spiritual effort, and then a kind of spiritual gift.
It is the lot of man to share in the deeper aspirations of the universe around him and to share his own destiny as well as that of the universe, now by adjusting himself to its forces, now by putting the whole of his energy to his own ends and purposes. And in this process of progressive change God becomes a co-worker with him, provided man takes the initiative: Verily God will not change the condition of men, till they change what is in themselves. If he does not take the initiative, if he does not evolve the inner richness of his being, if he ceases to feel the inner push of advancing life, then the spirit within him hardens into stone and he is reduced to the level of dead matter.
Change | Destiny | Ends | Energy | God | Man | Spirit | Universe | Will | God |