This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
Cause | Circumstances | Injustice | Injustice | Philanthropy | Wisdom |
War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.
Circumstances | Progress | War | Wisdom |
The earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of life.
Earnestness | Life | Life | Wisdom |
Happiness is not in our circumstances but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are.
Circumstances | Wisdom | Happiness |
Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
When we desire or solicit any thing, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
Circumstances | Desire | Good | Wisdom |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
Just as life is defined as biological change and death as its lack, so meaning in life is characterized by the application of stable patterns to changing circumstances and the replacing of old patterns of understanding with new and exploratory ones. Meaning is found in the losing of it, the searching after it, and in the finding of it again. The meaning in your life is in flux and is to be found in the flux (the flow) of meaning, which is therefore itself a source of meaning in your life. All this does require, however, the developing of a tolerance for ambiguity, of a willingness to accept the inevitability of change and the precariousness of your present vision, and of an openness to the unending richness of your experience of the world in its manifold variety and diversity.
Ambiguity | Change | Circumstances | Death | Diversity | Experience | Life | Life | Meaning | Openness | Present | Understanding | Vision | World | Old |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
The meaning of life is to be found in the living of it, and even for the individual a considerable range of possibilities and an unending flow of reflections upon your life constitutes part of that meaning. Play has no ultimate goal, no serious goal that will bring it to an end, but rather renews itself in constant repetition, with no repetition being an exact repeat of a prior instance. Living has a series of goals and is serious as well as playful, and yet the goals are always in transformation, or at least always in doubt. Circumstances are often similar, but it is not easy to specify exactness in your lived experience, even with someone with whom you have lived most of your life.
Circumstances | Doubt | Experience | Goals | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Will |
Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
R. E. C. Browne, fully Robert Eric Charles Browne
Medieval churchmen… held that faith, hope and love are the fundamental Christian virtues and that the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude) are needed to express faith, hope and love in all the varying circumstances of life in the world.
Circumstances | Faith | Fortitude | Hope | Justice | Life | Life | Love | Prudence | Prudence | World |
Success is not primarily a matter of circumstances or native talent or even intelligence – it is a choice.
Choice | Circumstances | Intelligence | Success | Talent |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
All theories, all values, all reforms, all revolutions, all change, and all actions are built on the shifting sands of custom and opinion, and the winds of doubt and new circumstances and considerations are always blowing, always rising.
Change | Circumstances | Custom | Doubt | Opinion | Theories |
It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.
Generosity | World |
The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the massification of society… The individual who is prevented by circumstances from becoming a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be. He lives vicariously and experiences the athletic or amorous or military exploits of the god with whom he lives in spiritual symbiosis.
Action | Circumstances | Cult | God | Hero | Individual | Society | Thought | God | Thought |