This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The all-round liberally educated man, from Paleolithic times to the time when the earth shall become a cold cinder, will always be the same, namely, the man who follows his standards, of truth and beauty, who employs his learning and observation, his reason, his expression, for purposes of production, that is, to add something of his own to the stock of the world's ideas.
Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
While we're talking, envious time is fleeing: seize the day, put no trust in the future.
Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer.
We are all the time following the influences which will presently, be our rulers; we are making our own destiny. We are choosing our habits, our associates, our traits, our homes. In time these acquire a power over us which enslaves our will, and from them we neither will nor can break loose.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.
Ilya, Viscount Prigogine, fully Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin
The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.
A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.
Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani
The man who is eager to reform himself has no time or inclination to criticise others.
Inclination | Man | Reform | Time |
The evil of our time is the loss of consciousness of evil.
Consciousness | Evil | Time | Loss |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears -- there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. And it was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it.
In our time and culture, the battlefield of life is money. Instead of horses and chariots, guns and fortresses, there are banks, checkbooks, credit cards, mortgages, salaries, the tax authorities. But the inner enemies remain the same now as they were in ancient India or feudal Japan: fear, self-deception, vanity, egoism, wishful thinking, tension and violence.
Time disappears into outer action or inner impulses. Into doings, cravings, or dreamings. But human time is conscious time. And this has been lost, destroyed. In its place there is now animal time (doing, moving about, preying on others, eating, building, killing, etc. ); plant time (dreaming, languishing, imagining); or “mineral” — that is, mechanical — time: the time of devices such as clocks and computers. What we call logical thinking is often just an internal version of these lifeless machines. Implicitly, we even take pride in the mechanicity of our thinking when, forgetting the metaphorical origin of the usage, we refer to a computer’s “intelligence.” This is mental time, “mineral” in its rigidity and sterility. We lay this logical cement over organic life out there and in ourselves. Carried to its extreme, this becomes the mindset that measures the whole of human life solely by the “bottom line.
It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ''speak with the accent of natives'' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.
Art | Effort | Learning | People | Silence | Time | Art | Learn |
So can you see the fact of violence—the fact not only outside of you but also inside you—and not have any time interval between listening and acting? This means by the very act of listening you are free from violence. You are totally free from violence because you have not admitted time, an ideology through which you can get rid of violence. This requires very deep meditation, not just a verbal agreement or disagreement. We never listen to anything; our minds, our brain cells are so conditioned to an ideology about violence that we never look at the fact of violence. We look at the fact of violence through an ideology, and the looking at violence through an ideology creates a time interval. And when you admit time, there is no end to violence; you go on showing violence, preaching non-violence.
To search means, first, I need Being, Truth; second, I do not know where to find it; and third, an action takes place that is not based on fantasies of certainty— while at the same time a waiting takes place that is rooted not in wishful thinking but in a deep sense of urgency
Action | Need | Search | Sense | Thinking | Time | Waiting |
Joris-Karl "J.K." Huysmans, pseudonym for Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans
Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God...It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin.
Neither time nor space exists for the man who knows the eternal. Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect, and space is divided for him into dimensions; time, into past, present, and future.