This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.
Difficulty | Heart | Impossibility | Light | Man |
Faced with the admitted difficulty of managing the creative process, we are doubling our efforts to do so. Is this because science has failed to deliver, having given us nothing more than nuclear power, penicillin, space travel, genetic engineering, transistors, and superconductors? Or is it because governments everywhere regard as a reproach activities they cannot advantageously control? They felt that way about the marketplace for goods, but trillions of wasted dollars later, they have come to recognize the efficiency of this self-regulating system. Not so, however, with the marketplace for ideas.
Difficulty | Efficiency | Nothing | Regard | Science | Space |
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
Difficulty | Ideas | Old |
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life.
Difficulty | Failure | Fear | Learning | Personality | Price | Failure | Obstacle |
Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.
Business | Danger | Desire | Difficulty | Folly | Knowledge | Life | Life | Danger | Business |
L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
Behavior | Consequences | Desire | Difficulty | Pain | Responsibility |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
Better | Difficulty | Forgiveness | Glory | Hell | Important | Men | Mind | Mistake | People | Society | Will | Forgiveness | Society | Forgive | Think |
Knowledge is historical that circumscribes pleurisy by its four phenomena: fever, difficulty in breathing, coughing, and pains in the side. Knowledge would be philosophical that called into question the origin, the principle, the causes of the disease: cold, serous discharge, inflammation of the pleura. The distinction between the historical and the philosophical is not the distinction between cause and effect.
Cause | Difficulty | Distinction | Knowledge | Question |
Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
My loving children, my children who were created with God's beauty, my wise children, whatever difficulty you may have, do not ever leave His charge. Just as the prophets of God kept their faith firm and were tolerant in spite of the problems they had, no matter what difficulties you may experience, be tolerant, be forbearant and embrace all living things as your own life.
Children | Difficulty | Faith | God | Problems | Wise | God |
Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself it’s own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
Change | Difficulty | Order | Thinking |
Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
Change | Difficulty | Order | Thinking |
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
Blame | Difficulty | Free will | Individual | Problems | Responsibility | Will |
Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.
Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
This show has a purpose: that you learn how to play the various parts of the life movie without identifying your Self with your role. It is important to avoid identification with pain or anger or any kind of mental or physical suffering that comes. The best way to dissociate yourself from your difficulty is to be mentally detached, as if you were merely a spectator, while at the same time seeking a remedy. Don’t expect to attain unalloyed peace and happiness from earthly life. This should be your attitude: no matter what your experiences are, enjoy them in an objective way, as you would a movie.
Anger | Difficulty | Important | Life | Life | Pain | Peace | Play | Self | Suffering | Time | Happiness | Learn |
It is a great difficulty and great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe; ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil; will be able to hold without any technique. One favorable moment is enough. The little thing is easily and concisely set down. It’s already done! It was a tiny but real affair, and someday, through the repetition of such small but original deeds, there will come one work upon which I can really build.
In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the princesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs… In magic - and in life - there is only the present moment, the now. 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. Or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don't want and how to get what we have always dreamed of… In some cases, abandon the path of what, because we simply do not believe it. This is easy, all we have to do to prove that the road is not for us. But the events that begin to get and inspiration that comes to us through our journey… I'm not doing anything, and yet I'm also doing the most important thing a man can do: I'm listening to what I needed to hear from myself.
Consequences | Difficulty | Events | Important | Inspiration | Life | Life | Listening | Magic | Man | Present | Thinking | Time | Think |
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 |