This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Most of us are not aware of our motivations for living or our priorities for action. We drift with the tides of societal fashions, floating in and out of social concerns at the whim of societal dictates and on the basis of images created by the media or superficial, personal desires to be helpful, useful persons. We are used to living at the surface, afraid of the depths, and therefore our actions and concerns about humanity are shallow, fragile vessels easily damaged. Ultimately most of us are concerned chiefly with our small lives, our collection of sensual pleasures, our personal salvation, and our anxiety about sickness and death, rather than the misery created by collective indifference and callousness.
Perfection | Silence | Understanding | Understand |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The tolerance of all religions is a law of nature, stamped on the hearts of all men.
Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life.
Absence | Body | Existence | Illusion | Knowledge | Past | Silence | Thought | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Ramsey, who had been sitting loosely, folded her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If you tell the truth about yourself, you can hardly tell the other people.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Since our appearances, that part of us which appears, are so fleeting compared to the other, the unseen part of us, stretching away, means that the unseen can survive, be recovered somehow attached to a person or another , or even haunting certain places after death.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from.
A type does not reproduce any man in particular; it cannot be exactly superposed upon any individual; it sums up and concentrates under one human form a whole family of characters and minds. A type is no abridgement: it is a condensation.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Abuse | Destiny | Ends | Example | Family | Future | Glory | Humility | Nothing | Search | Silence | Thought | Following | Old | Thought |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it.
Acceptance | Agony | Contentment | Man | Noise | People | Quiet | Words | Wrong | Value |
It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion --to rid God of His Maggots.
Silence |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.
Noise |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.
Day | Difficulty | Indifference | Man | Self | Sense | Silence | Sympathy |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.