This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honored and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.
Choice | Civilization | Cynicism | Effort | Eternal | Force | Habit | Life | Life | People | Reality | Reason | Rule | Words | World |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Live not in ignorance. Do not waste your precious life-span in differentiating and judging your fellow men, but learn to long for the love of God. Even in the midst of your worldly activities, love only to find and realize your true Identity with your Beloved God.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
In God-realization, the soul drops its separate consciousness and transcends duality in the abiding knowledge of its identity with the Infinite Reality.
Consciousness | Duality | Knowledge | Soul |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Awaken from your ignorance and try at least to understand that, in the uncompromisingly Indivisible Oneness, not only is the Avatar God, but also the ant and the sparrow, just as one and all of you are nothing but God. The only apparent difference is in the states of consciousness. The Avatar knows that that which is a sparrow is not a sparrow, whereas the sparrow does not realize this and, being ignorant of its ignorance, identifies itself as a sparrow. Live not in ignorance. Do not waste your precious life-span in differentiating and judging your fellowmen, but learn to long for the love of God. Even in the midst of your worldly activities, live only to find and realize your true identity with your Beloved God.
Everyone has their own way of changing, or, what amounts to the same thing, of perceiving that everything changes. In this matter, nothing is more arrogant than trying to dictate to others. My way of no longer being the same is, by definition, the most unique part of what I am . Yet God knows there are ideological traffic police around, and we can hear their whistles blast: go left, go right, here, later, get moving, not now... The insistence on identity and the injunction to make a break both, and in the same way, feel like abuses.
It's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
Hypothesis | Individual | Power |
Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
In God, absolute unity is absolute multiplicity, absolute identity is absolute diversity; absolute actuality is absolute potentiality.
Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld
This very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends, and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance….But both [artist and enjoyer], in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.
Art | Ego | Individuality | Mortal | Receive | Religion | Soul | Work | Art |
For it is not ordained for the Spiritual Man that, finding his high realm, he shall enter altogether there, and pass out of the vision of mankind. It is true that he dwells in heaven, but he also dwells on earth. He has angels and archangels, the hosts of the just made perfect, for his familiar friends, but he has at the same time found a new kinship with the prone children of men, who stumble and sin in the dark. Finding sinlessness, he finds also that the world’s sin and shame are his, not to share, but to atone; finding kinship with angels, he likewise finds his part in the toil of angels, the toil for the redemption of the world.
Angels | Children | Man | Redemption | Shame | Sin | Time | Vision |
Incorrect knowledge is mistaking the identity of one thing for the other or one object for another.
Paige Rense, aka Paige Rense Noland
When I quit working, I lost all sense of identity in about fifteen minutes.
Sense |
If thousands of prenatal memories were to come crowding in together, the mind's life would be horrible, crazy. Worse, one's own personal identity would be lost, merged in all the others.
Paul Wellstone, fully Paul David Wellstone
What the poor, the weak, and the inarticulate desperately require is power, organization, and a sense of identity and purpose, not rarefied advice of political scientists.
Creation, incarnation and redemption are to be seen as no more than three complementary aspects of one and the same process.
The magnitude present in any mass is definitely one thing, yet its identity from part to part does not imply any such community as would entail common experience; within that identity there is diversity, for it is a condition only, not the actual Essence.
Present |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
The ethos of redemption is realized in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.
Means | Redemption |
Reuel Howe, fully Reuel Lanphier Howe
Until all students are faced by the tragedies, the contradictions and the stark questions of life, they cannot understand the need for redemption or God's redemptive action.
Need | Redemption | Understand |
Raymond Aron, fully Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron
The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skeptics.
Abstract | Absurd | Challenge | Doubt | Individual | Man | Plan | Redemption | Revolution | Soul | Surrender | Teach |
Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
Time |
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.