This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
We who lived in the concentration camps can remember those who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing; the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances – to choose one’s own way.
Circumstances | Giving |
A covenant is a contract. When two people enter into a covenant, it means that one party undertakes to do certain things provided the other party does certain other things. Thus it is a mutual agreement… If you think only kindly, , optimistic, and constructive thoughts, if you will speak only positive and helpful words at all times, if you will do only good and constructive deeds, you will be fulfilling your side of the great covenant – and in no circumstances could God fail to fulfill His.
Circumstances | Deeds | God | Good | Means | People | Will | Words | God | Think |
If we wait until circumstances are precisely right for us to achieve and accomplish something, then nothing ever will be achieved or accomplished. Neither we nor circumstances are ever precisely right.
Circumstances | Nothing | Right | Will |
The greatest discover of my lifetime was that a person can change the circumstances of his life by changing his thoughts and attitudes.
Change | Circumstances | Life | Life |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
It seems to me… that external circumstances often serve as occasions for a new attitude to life and the world, long prepared in the unconscious, to become manifest.
Circumstances | Life | Life | World |
People who are dying simply see more clearly what has always been true: We are in the perpetual care of others. They are grateful for any and all kindnesses, and they do not take the generosity of others for granted.
Care | Generosity | People |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.
Earnestness | Life | Life | Zeal |
Man cannot… make circumstances for his purpose, but he always has it in his power to improve them when they occur.
Circumstances | Man | Power | Purpose | Purpose |
The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power.
Achievement | Attention | Circumstances | Destroy | Genius | Little | Mediocrity | Men | Nature | Power | Prison | Sense |
Ken Robinson, fully Sir Kenneth Robinson
Life is not linear; it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to circumstances they help create for us.
Circumstances | Life | Life | Organic |
Servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. IT is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.
Body | Circumstances | Equity | Happy | Labor | People | Society | Society |
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Future | Generosity | Giving | Present |