This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh there is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
Experience | Obscurity | Obscurity | People | Poetry |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.
Experience | Intelligence | Meaning |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
What a fool I am… Perhaps it is a fool's experience of life that most approximates Eden...a fool's paradise precluded to the very intelligent. Is Forest Gump's foolish life just one paradisical poem after another, each episode delivering him into Eden after Eden, physically, psychologically and spiritually? Does my anxious educated and socially conditioned thinking, occult my own manifested Edens?
Ego | Experience | Mystery | Power | Relationship | Sacrifice | Simplicity |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The surface mind is like a dinghy on a vast sea. Dreams are the dimension for initiation and awakenings. Revelations, healing, or the reflection of a potential healing show up in dreams. One puts oneself into a vulnerable position because one surrenders the surface mind’s preferential viewpoint and goes into letting the dream reveal what its forces might be, and what the intent of the vaster nature is. Denied aspects by the surface psyche are cast into the unconscious where they live their material and influence not only us but others as well, whether we are conscious of it or not. The ego can’t project, it can’t cast out, it is predominantly a witness. What you think are your resources, and who and what you think you are is really a mask, and it precludes your seeing the authentic being. The whole development in the second half of life is to discover the authentic being and to release the defenses, and the masks, and meeting other people’s expectations. We begin to explore the mystery of natural beingness which is a very strange things for human beings – we have to be trained back into it.
Body | Disease | Energy | Experience | Life | Life | Love | Nature |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.
Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Illness comes from living too small a process or too large a process.
Art | Awareness | Compensation | Experience | Individual | Present | System | Universe | Will | Wrong | Art | Awareness | Value |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The Self, The Ego, and The Shadow operate in time and out of time. The ego operates almost exclusively in time. The Ego is the chief organ of Temporal Awareness.
Ability | Age | Enjoyment | Experience | Individual | Inspiration | Life | Life | Model | Mystery | People | Rest | Sense | Unique | Will | Work | Old |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing.
Adventure | Awareness | Defense | Demeanor | Experience | Extreme | Giving | Important | Indifference | Knowledge | Law | Means | Power | Qualities | Sacred | Time | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Awareness |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Most of us who know silence at the starting stages; know it as just not talking. The mind is going a mile a minute but you are not talking and you are writing notes too. That’s your definition of silence. I’ve had a lot of experience over the years watching people in silence and appreciation and note that each person has to struggle with what it actually means to dissolve out of conceptual layers of the psyche and to find the ability to begin to be quiet enough so that not only are you back into tune with nature but you can dissolve on into deeper and deeper places. To be functionally a vehicle that can hear what is called the wee small voice and/or the music of the spheres and/or Divine council and/or visions.
Ego | Experience | Future | Relationship | Thought | Thought |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
I believe that if you put fine food into a body with a crummy mind, you get a crummy body, but if you put crummy food into a body with expanded awareness, you get a fine body.
Defense | Experience | Mystery | Pain |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Take away the moral argument: persuade men that when ascribing to the Deity justice and mercy they are speaking of qualities generically distinct from those which exist among mankind -- qualities which we are altogether unable to conceive, and which may be compatible with acts that men would term grossly unjust and unmerciful: tell them that guilt may be entirely unconnected with a personal act, that millions of infants may be called into existence for a moment to be precipitated into a place of torment, that vast nations may live and die, and then be raised again to endure a never-ending punishment, because they did not believe in a religion of which they had never heard, or because a crime was committed thousands of years before they were in existence: convince them that all this is part of a transcendentally perfect and righteous moral scheme, and there is no imaginable abyss to which such a doctrine will not lead. You will have blotted out those fundamental notions of right and wrong which the Creator has engraven upon every heart; you will have extinguished the lamp of conscience; you will have taught men to stifle the inner voice as a lying witness, and to esteem it virtuous to disobey it. But even this does not represent the full extent of the evil.
Character | Experience | Important | Success | Intellect |
All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring...From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives. Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.
Events | Experience | Order | Past | Time |
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
For Quality: Stamp out fires, automate, computerize, M.B.O., install merit pay, rank people, best efforts, zero defects. WRONG!!!! Missing ingredient: profound knowledge.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.
Determination | Experience | Life | Life | Nothing | Pleasure |
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section: but to the whole picture not one is initiated.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on the next step — the search after forms of the transition or the approach to the proletarian revolution.
Experience | History | Majority | Meaning | Power | Price | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Time |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.
Equality | Experience | Nations | Right | Rights | Teach | Unity |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
When the Soviet government is experiencing a difficult period and plots are being hatched by bourgeois elements and when at a critical moment we manage to lay bare these plots — do they think they are discovered accidentally? Oh, no, not accidentally. They are discovered because the plotters live among the masses, because they cannot succeed in their plots without the workers and peasants and it is there that, in the long run, they run up against people who go to that badly organized, as they said here, Cheka and say that exploiters are gathered in a certain place.
Experience | Struggle | Theoretical |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Bitterness | Experience | Quiet |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.
Experience | Faith | Grave | Little | Will | Think | Understand |