This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The most incessant occupation of the human intellect throughout life is the ascertainment of truth.
Life | Life | Occupation | Truth | Intellect |
The teacher is a sculptor of the intangible future. There is no more dangerous occupation on the planet, for what we conceive as our masterpiece may appear out of time to mock us - a horrible caricature of ourselves... We, too, like the generation before us, are the cracked, the battered, the malformed products of remoter chisels shaping the most obstinate substance in the universe; the substance of man.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
Love is the occupation of the idle man, the amusement of a busy one, and the shipwreck of a sovereign.
Love | Man | Occupation |
Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer
Our heart is the altar. In every occupation let a spark of the holy fire remain within you, so that you may fan it into a flame.
Heart | Occupation |
Jerome K. Jerome, fully Jerome Klapka Jerome
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.
Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
It is a key fact about American policy in Vietnam that the withdrawel of American troops was built into it from the start. None of the presidents who waged war in Vietnam contemplated an open-ended campaign; all promised the public that American troops would be able to leave in the not-too-remote future. The promise of withdrawel precluded a policy of occupation of the traditional colonial sort, in which a great power simply imposes its will on a small one indefinitely.
Occupation | Policy | Power | Promise | Public | War | Will |
Jules Renard, aka Pierre-Jules Renard
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
Occupation | People | Talent |
Lester Thurow, fully Lester Carl Thurow, aka L.C. Thurow
No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp a shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing.
Defeat | Majority | Men | Occupation | Revolution | Time |
Lewis Carroll, pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Danger | Harmony | Joy | Laughter | Learning | Spirit | Danger |
Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.
Occupation | Truth |
Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires. It is impossible for any one who has not been constrained, by the course of his occupation and thoughts, to a habit of continual self-correction, to be aware of the amount of error in relation to judgment arising from this tendency. The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.
Error | Evidence | Father | Force | Habit | Judgment | Necessity | Occupation | Receive | Respect | Temptation | Respect | Temptation |
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we cease to grow, we begin to die.
Impression | Little | Need | Power |
From childhood I was compelled to concentrate attention upon myself. This caused me much suffering, but to my present view, it was a blessing in disguise for it has taught me to appreciate the inestimable value of introspection in the preservation of life, as well as a means of achievement. The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves. The premature death of millions is primarily traceable to this cause. Even among those who exercise care, it is a common mistake to avoid imaginary, and ignore the real dangers. And what is true of an individual also applies, more or less, to a people as a whole.
Attention | Childhood | Consciousness | Contemplation | Death | Disguise | Existence | Individual | Knowledge | Means | Mistake | Occupation | People | Present | World | Contemplation | Value |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the naturals, the ones who somehow know how to teach.
Competence | Man | Occupation |
David Swing, aka Professor Swing
Divine Spirit never creates a perfect man, but sets him going with the permission to become perfect. The plan of God is that of perpetual assistance. He fills the earth with ores, with coals, with the power to produce harvests of grass, fruits and grains, and then endows man with an expansive faculty, such that he can develop the world and himself. The world, as God gave it to His children, is one of opportunities and outfits, and not of completed things. Inspiration would therefore assume the form of a help rather than of a full occupation of the human intellect and feelings, and would no more be a perfect unfolding of God's whole character than the wild Indian is an expression of God's perfect ideal of the creature man.
Earth | God | Man | Occupation | Plan | Power | Spirit | World | God | Intellect |
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.
Art | Courage | Ends | Ideals | Life | Life | Luxury | Men | Occupation | Sense | Time | Art | Happiness |
Queen Christina, later adopted the name Christina Alexandra NULL
It is necessary to try to pass one's self always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.
Occupation | Self |
No, the Golden Mean is not a sunny, untroubled nullity, but a deep awareness of possibilities, with one eye cocked toward Comedy and the other eye skewed toward Tragedy, and out of this feat of balanced observation emerges Humor, not as a foolish amusement or an escape from reality, but as a breadth of perception, and what Heracleitus called an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. A reconciliation of opposites, indeed.
Awareness | Comedy | Observation | Reconciliation | Awareness |
Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah
We could talk further about the importance of finding an occupation that both gives you a sense of self-respect and provides the resources to live an autonomous life. We talk in Habits of the Heart, about these issues-how for many Americans, at various levels in the occupational hierarchy, the job somehow doesn't prove adequate in fulfilling one's autonomous self and often becomes a means-an instrument-to the acquisition of those resources which will allow one to live in a private lifestyle that will somehow fulfill this expectation that we will find this unique person-who we really are-and attain self-realization, self-fulfillment, happiness. The terms are several but they all point in the same direction. But when we press the question, "What are the criteria that tell us what happiness is or that define the wants that when they are satisfied will lead to self-realization?", then the confident tones that we have been hearing begin to falter. And instead of any clear notion of any content there is simply the reassertion of "Whatever for you that fulfillment or happiness may be." It is not surprising that Americans turn to psychology as the place that is focused on that inner self.
Expectation | Fulfillment | Occupation | Psychology | Self | Sense | Unique | Wants | Will | Expectation | Happiness |