This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Artistic growth is, more than anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy: only the great artist knows how difficult it is.
Consciousness | Spirit |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter; they can actually be transformed into each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary particles may be created from the available energy and the old particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy. But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles in Plato's Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. All things are numbers is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a much more complicated nature. The Greek philosophers thought of static forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law. The equation of motion holds at all times, it is in this sense eternal, whereas the geometrical forms, like the orbits, are changing. Therefore, the mathematical forms that represent the elementary particles will be solutions of some eternal law of motion for matter. This is a problem which has not yet been solved.
Consciousness | Doubt | Famous | History | Life | Life | Reality | Relationship | Thinking | Truth | Trial |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
[The Devil said:] It seems but yesterday that I launched Hell’s Five Hundred Year Plan.… I saw that Hell had to move with the tide and leave the rest to rationalism, liberalism and universal compulsory education… At first there was some opposition in Hell. Baal, Beelzebub and a handful of almost aboriginal demons who are still living in the 10th Century B.C. and have not had an idea since the Fall, naturally opposed the New Deal.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.
Evidence | Hope | Knowledge | Little | Men | Need | Thought | Thought |
Gradually it became clear that it is a fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation, to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hindering one's absorption in the excitation. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations of genitality constitute a denial of genitality as a biological function. By composing it of non-genital excitations, one denies the existence of genitality. The function of the orgasm, however, had revealed the qualitative difference between genitality and pregenitality. Only the genital apparatus can provide orgasm and can discharge sexual energy completely. Pregenitality, on the other hand, can only increase vegetative tensions. One readily sees the deep rift which formed here in psychoanalytic concepts.
Consciousness | Enemy | Feelings | Influence | Life | Life | Mystical | Regulation |
We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
Consciousness | Courage | Imagination | Need | Power | Think |
Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
Consciousness | Man | Men | Purpose | Purpose |
Theologically, however, the freedom and hope of the local tradition of the church depends upon trusting and saying aloud the conviction that the U.S. empire does not finally merit fear, trust, or eventually obedience.
Consciousness | Culture | Perception |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.
Consciousness | Important | Sense | Temper |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Thus in a primary oral culture, where all verbalization is oral, utterances are always given their greater precision by nonverbal elements, which form the infrastructure of the oral utterance, giving it its fuller, situation meaning. Not so much depends on the words themselves. … (T)exts force words to bear more weight.
Consciousness | Words | World |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
It is of course possible to count as "writing" any semiotic mark, that is, any visible or sensible mark which an individual makes and assigns a meaning to. Using the term "writing" in this extended sense trivializes its meaning. The critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge was achieved within human consciousness not when simple semiotic marking was devised but when a coded system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text. This is what we usually mean today by writing in its sharply focused sense.
Consciousness | Experience | Harmony | Knowledge | Means |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.
Consciousness | Future | Past | World | Old |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Most persons are distressed, and many depressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhumane pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product.
Consciousness | Individual | Knowledge | Meaning | Sense | System | Unique | Words | Writing |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Try to imagine a culture in which no one has ever "looked up" anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression "to look up something" is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning.
Alienation | Consciousness | Good | Need | Nothing | Praise | Writing | Understand |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Have you ever noticed when you’re in the presence of certain people that you feel better about yourself? Their compassionate energy has the noticeably pleasant impact of simply making you feel really good about yourself. You’ll impact others with this energy of compassion as you develop your connection to intention.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Anything that has been accomplished by any other human being in the physical realm is within the field of possibility.