This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
One sign of maturity is the ability to be comfortable with people who are not like us.
Relationship means contact, communion. There cannot be communion where people are divided by ideas. A belief may gather a group of people around itself. Such a group will inevitably breed opposition and so form another group with a different belief. Ideas postpone direct relationship with the problem.
Belief | Character | Ideas | Means | Opposition | People | Relationship | Will |
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
An eternal happiness is a security for which there is no longer any market value in the speculative nineteenth century; at the very most it may be used by the gentlemen of the clerical profession to swindle rural innocents.
Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva
To know a people’s character, we must see it at its homes, and look chiefly to the humbler abodes where that portion of the people dwells which makes the broad basis of the national prosperity.
Character | People | Prosperity |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
There is an aliveness in people who are living life and not merely observing or intellectualizing it... During the time of catastrophic change, each individual has the opportunity to feel fully alive and resource-filled-awake far beyond the daily soporific states of consciousness in which most of us reside. Living on an edge heightens the human awareness. It does not dull it.
Aliveness | Awareness | Change | Character | Consciousness | Individual | Life | Life | Opportunity | People | Time |
Self-knowledge is the primary step in conscious evolutionary change. When people confront and integrate their individual fears and limitations, they facilitate the confrontation and integration of our racial, national, and planetary fears. Lasting social change is only possible when individual consciousness has first been changed.
Change | Character | Consciousness | Individual | Integration | Knowledge | People | Self | Self-knowledge |
John L. Lewis, fully John Llewellyn Lewis
Often those who seek only license for their plundering, cry “liberty.” In the guise of this Old American ideal, men of vast economic domain would destroy what little liberty remains to those who toil. The liberty we seek is different. It is liberty fro common people - freedom from economic bondage, freedom from the oppressions of the vast bureaucracies of great corporations; freedom to regain again some human initiative, freedom that arises from economic security and human self-respect.
Character | Destroy | Freedom | Initiative | Liberty | Little | Men | People | Respect | Security | Self | Old |
Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the face, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-interest, fear, despair - these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.
Character | Despair | Doubt | Enthusiasm | Fear | Ideals | People | Self | Self-interest | Soul | Spirit | Worry | Old |
The old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.
Moshe Chayim Luzzatto, also Moses Hayyim Luzzato, known by Hebrew acronym RaMCHal
Envy comes from foolishness and a lack of understanding. When you are envious of someone, you do not gain anything and o not cause a loss to the person you envy. The only person who loses out is you. There are some people whose foolishness is so strong that whenever they see someone else they know have some good fortune, they feel pain and suffering They are so pained by what others have they derive no pleasure from what they themselves possess.
Cause | Character | Envy | Fortune | Good | Pain | People | Pleasure | Suffering | Understanding | Loss |