This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the universal laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rock-like. But because it is so deep we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it.
You can’t measure time the way you measure the distance between two points. Time doesn’t pass. We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we’re always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn’t act as we should have… You have passed through the two hardest tests on the spiritual road: the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what you encounter… If you concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. You'll see that there is life in the desert, that there are stars in the heavens... Life will be a party for you, a grand festival; because life is the moment we're living right now… If you have a work instead of a job, every day is holiday… If you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.
Consequences | Courage | Day | Difficulty | Happy | Life | Life | Patience | Right | Thinking | Time | Will | Work |
The only power you have on this planet is the power of your decisions… The optimist and the pessimist both die in the end, but each lives his life in a completely different way… The pain of yesterday is the strength of today… The past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning… The two toughest tests on the spiritual path are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage to not disappoint us with what we find… The universe always helps us in the fight for our dreams, as crazy as they may be. Because they are our dreams, and we even know how much trouble it costs us to dream them… The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.
Courage | Dreams | Feelings | Future | Life | Life | Pain | Past | Patience | Power | Right | Sense | Soul | Strength | Universe | Trouble |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
While mission is foundational, it is also insufficient because, by its nature, it is extraordinarily difficult to assess how we are doing by looking only at the mission. For this we need to stick our necks out and articulate "an image of the future we seek to create." Results-oriented leaders, therefore, must have both a mission and a vision. Results mean little without purpose, for a very practical and powerful reason: a mission instills both the passion and the patience for the long journey. While vision inspires passion, many failed ventures are characterized by passion without patience.
Future | Little | Mission | Need | Passion | Patience | Vision |
God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely maternal nature, I praise casualness . It seems to me the rarest of virtues. It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point of necessity when they are adolescents.
Children | Courage | Enough | Firmness | Flexibility | Fortitude | Important | Mother | Necessity | Patience | Praise | Flexibility | Parent |
God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.
Courage | Firmness | Flexibility | Fortitude | Mother | Need | Patience | Flexibility |
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Forbearance, patience and tolerance are the only conditions which keep two individual hearts united.
Individual | Patience |
Ah, shall I ever attain to the Ideal that burst upon me with such splendour of light & joy in those poems of 1869—so filling, so possessing me, I seemed as if I had by one bound attained to that ideal—as if I were already a very twin of the soul from whom they emanated. But now I know that divine foretaste indicated what was possible for me, not what was accomplished—I know the slow growth—the standstill winters that follow the growing joyous springs & ripening summers. I believe it will take more lives than this one to reach that mountain on which I was transfigured again, never to descend more, but to start thence for new heights, fresh glories. Ah, dear friend, will you be able to have patience with me, for me? (
The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don't yield immediate solutions.
The longing to behold this pre-established harmony [of phenomena and theoretical principles] is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself... The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
Effort | Harmony | Intention | Longing | Man | Mind | Patience | Perseverance | Phenomena | Work | Theoretical |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist.
Humility | Impression | Means | Patience |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Confidence | Doubt | Enough | Harmony | Life | Life | Patience | Simplicity | Solitude |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others.
Confidence | Enough | Patience | Simplicity | Solitude |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
Childhood | Enough | Grave | Joy | Men | Parents | Patience | Quiet | Think |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.
Enough | Patience | Simplicity |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.
Confidence | Enough | Life | Life | Patience | Simplicity | Solitude |