This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Local knowledge is at one with lived experience if indeed it is true that this knowledge is of the localities in which the knowing subject lives. To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in.
Experience | Knowing | Knowledge |
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
Experience | War |
The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.
Experience | Life | Life | Love |
It is crucial to understand and to gain the conviction that the laws of cause and effect govern the universe and all beings. … There are only two way to erase the trace left by a harmful act: either by going through the experience of suffering that is its natural consequence, or by purifying it with the appropriate antidotes before the appearance of its dire effects.
Appearance | Cause | Experience | Suffering | Universe | Govern | Understand |
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
Experience | Grace | Gratitude | Love | Happiness |
Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate.
Experience | Judgment | Nothing | Principles |
Once, in the early years of his leadership, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi said to his disciples: "One must live with the times." He later explained his meaning: One should live with and experience in one's own life the Torah portion of the week and the specific section of the week's portion which is connected to that day.
Experience | Life | Life | Torah |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
To become conscious of what is unconscious and thus to enlarge one's consciousness means to get in touch with reality, and - in this sense - with truth (intellect-ually and affectively). To enlarge consciousness means to wake up, to lift a veil, to leave the cave, to bring light into the darkness. Could this be the same experience Zen Buddhists call "enlightenment?"
Consciousness | Experience | Light | Means | Sense | Truth | Zen |
Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.
Experience | Fear |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
How many parents experience the child's reactions in terms of his being obedient, of giving them pleasure, of being a care to them, and so forth, instead of perceiving or even being interested in what the child feels for and by himself?
Care | Experience | Giving | Parents | Child |
By far the larger part of it comes in life itself through the two great primary channels of action and experience — the work that we do and the relations we sustain in love and friendship to other lives.
Action | Experience | Life | Life | Love | Work | Friendship |
The witness is frequent and insistent that God is inherently relational and personal. So God cannot be either received or understood apart from our being personal and realtional as well. That most emphatically excludes the detached intellect as a way of knowing God. It excludes programmatic work as a way of knowing God. It excludes cultivation of the ecstatic and visionary as a way of knowing God. God is not an abstract idea that can be mastered, not an impersonal force that can be used, not a private experience that can be indulged.
Abstract | Cultivation | Experience | Force | God | Knowing | Witness | Work | God | Intellect |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.
Experience | Object | World |
Pride is a reaction formation to the feeling of inferiority, of the experience of powerlessness, of not being worthy enough of love. Only anxiety compels a person to lose moderation and to want to be more than he is. Out of fear of being an animal, he has to become an angel. Out of fear of being a nothing, a god. Anxiety never allows him to be simply a man.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Enough | Experience | Fear | Moderation | Moderation |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.
Experience | Love | Man | Sense |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.
Belief | Experience | God | Love | Thought | God | Thought |