This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Jung equates the unconscious with the soul, and so when we try to live fully consciously in an intellectually predictable world, protected form all mysteries and comfortable with conformity, we lose our everyday opportunities for the soulful life. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. Intellect, looking outward, wants enlightenment and the pleasure of a burning enthusiasm. The soul, always drawn inward, seeks contemplation and the more shadowy, mysterious experience of the underworld.
Conformity | Contemplation | Enlightenment | Enthusiasm | Experience | Life | Life | Pleasure | Soul | Wants | World | Contemplation | Intellect |
True conversation is an interpenetration of worlds, a genuine intercourse of souls, which doesn’t have to be self-consciously profound but does have to touch matters of concern to the soul... Conversation may also relive us from the pressures of everyday activity and decision-making, opening us up to undisclosed levels of our experience. Soul resides in the overtones and undertones, not in the flat body of literal events. Conversation performs a pleasurable and gentle alchemy on experience, sublimating it into forms that can be examined. Experience itself takes wing from conversation... Conversation is the sex act of the soul, and as such it is supremely conducive to the cultivation of intimacy.
Alchemy | Body | Conversation | Cultivation | Decision | Events | Experience | Self | Soul |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
You become spiritually rich when you discover the riches of the kingdom within: when you have a consciousness of the oneness of all life; when you experience kinship with nature; when you are open to the buoyant spiritual life of being in tune with the Infinite; when you know the power of meditation and prayer.
Consciousness | Experience | Life | Life | Meditation | Nature | Oneness | Power | Prayer | Riches | Riches |
The error of our eye directs our mind: what error leads must err.
Nature is not easy to live with. It is hard to have rain on your cut hay, or floodwater over your cropland, or coyotes in your sheep; it is hard when nature does not respect your intentions, and she never does exactly respect them. Moreover, such problems belong to all of us, to the human lot. Humans who do not experience them are exempt only because they are paying (or underpaying) other humans such as farmers to deal with nature on their behalf.
Experience | Nature | Problems | Respect | Respect |
The world would be consistent without God; it would also be consistent with God; whichever hypothesis a man adopts will fit experience equally well.
Experience | God | Hypothesis | Man | Will | World |
Many people consider the happiest days in their lives when they received the applause and acclaim of others. But the fact they needed someone else’s approval for their happiness makes them dependent on others. Someone who can find happiness even when he is insulted is assured of having a happy life. Once a person knows that he is able to experience positive feelings even when insulted, he is free from the fear of what people might say to him. This can give a persona feeling of liberation. If you believe someone else’s words cannot hurt you, they won’t.
Applause | Experience | Fear | Feelings | Happy | Life | Life | People | Words | Approval | Happiness |
Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
We shall find in the experience of the past, in the observation of the progress that the sciences and civilization have already made, in the analysis of the progress of the human mind and of the development of its faculties, the strongest reasons for believing that nature has set no limit to the realization of our hopes.
Civilization | Experience | Mind | Nature | Observation | Past | Progress |
To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all to squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionalism and panic animality.
Darkness | Ego | Experience | Little | Panic | Personality | Self |
C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way.
We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow… the intellectual achievements of great scientists are being perverted by the material exploitation of industry and war…I have lived to experience the early results of scientific materialism… have watched pride of workmanship leave and human character decline as efficiency of production lines increased… I have seen the science I worshipped and the aircraft I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to save.
Character | Civilization | Efficiency | Experience | Industry | Materialism | Pride | Science | Security | Tomorrow | War | Weapons | Will |
Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretense to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?
Destiny | Expectation | Experience | Future | History | Man | Past | Phenomena | Success | Truth | Expectation |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.
Experience | Quotations | Wisdom | Wise |
Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning - and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.
Experience | Meaning | Wisdom |
Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of a cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.
Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler
Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.
Experience | Understanding | Unique |
D. W. Winicott, fully Donald Woods Winnicott
The first ego organization comes from the experience of threats of annihilation which do not lead to annihilation and from which, repeatedly, there is recovery
Ego | Experience | Organization |
D. W. Winicott, fully Donald Woods Winnicott
The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world, depends on experience which loeads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.
Experience | Family | Individual | Mother | Sacred | Society | Space | Trust | World | Society | Child |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Ability | Experience | Unique | Learn |