This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The greatest barrier to own healing is not the pain, sorrow or violence inflicted upon us as children. Our greatest hindrance is our ongoing capacity to judge, to criticize, and to bring tremendous harm to ourselves. If we can harden our heart against ourselves and meet our most tender feelings with anger and condemnation, we simultaneously armor our heart against the possibility of gentleness, love and healing.
Wayne Gretsky, fully Wayne Douglas Gretzky, “The Great One”
I couldn't beat people with my strength; I don't have a hard shot; I'm not the quickest skater in the league. My eyes and my mind have to do most of the work.
The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha—tranquility, peace, and repose—rest, in the deeper possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquility and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace. If you have a question about whether it is your ego or your higher self speaking, the answer becomes obvious when you ask yourself, Will this bring peace or turmoil to my life? Peace is not found in being right or being hurt or being angry.
Abundance | Appreciation | Consciousness | Enough | Kindness | Love | Peace | People | Sense | Trust | Will | Appreciation |
Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between troublesome creatures and pleasant ones. All neighbors are included. (pg. 202-203, Conservation and Local Economy)
While the government is studying and funding and organizing its ‘Big Thought’, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to ‘Think Little’, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work... A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
Until we end our violence against the earth- a matter ignored by most pacifists, as the issue of military violence is ignored by most conservationists-how can we hope to end our violence against each other? The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be an earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants.
Despair | Enlightenment | Grief | Land | Man | Pride | Sense | Thought | World | Think | Thought |
The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.
Care | Cultivation | Culture | Ideas | Meaning | Means | Sense | Understanding | Words | Worship |
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.
Sense |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In all technologically "advanced" countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community.
The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.
Bible | Body | Fear | Grief | Harmony | Sense | Soul | Spirit | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Work | World | Bible | Thought |
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
Deliberation | Loafing | Sense | Will | Deliberation |
We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
Ability | Arrogance | Behavior | Capacity | Change | Creativity | Danger | Doubt | Effort | Error | Good | Greed | Humility | Life | Life | Pride | Reverence | Sense | Will | World | Danger | Learn | Understand |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
To know all is to forgive all. No commonplace is more untrue. Behavior, whether conditioned by an individual neurosis or by society, can be understood, that is to say, one knows exactly why such and such an individual behaves as he does. But a personal action or deed is always mysterious. When we really act, precisely because it is a matter of free choice, we can never say exactly why we do this rather than that. But it is only deeds that we are required to forgive. If someone does me an injury, the question of forgiveness only arises if I am convinced (a) that the injury he did me was a free act on his part and therefore no less mysterious to him than to me, and (b) that it was me personally whom he meant to injure. He knows as well as they do why they are doing this -- they are a squad, detailed to execute a criminal. They do not know what they are doing, because it is not their business, as executioners, to know whom they are crucifying. If the person who does me an injury does not know what he is doing, then it is as ridiculous for me to talk about forgiving him as it would be for me to forgive a tile which falls on my head in a gale.