This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Uniformity brings death, variety brings life.
Death | Life | Life | Uniformity |
They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men, that most love variety and change.
One would think that the larger the company is in which we are engaged, the greater variety of thoughts and subjects would be started into discourse; but, instead of this we find that conversation is never so much straightened and confined, as in numerous assemblies.
Conversation | Think |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
It is the “where I am” that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled wit the infinite variety and freshness of God’s love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God’s love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them.
Death | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Love | Power | Wit | Understand |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.
Aesthetics | Change | Ethics | Existence | Life | Life | Progress |
Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture – grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous – the variety which is life.
Love is a very complex emotion, requiring a richness of personality and a great variety of talents.. It develops also into the abstract feeling for things or ideas, for beauty and learning, and, finally, into a feeling for the Supreme Being.
Abstract | Beauty | Ideas | Learning | Love | Personality | Beauty |
Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.
Appearance | Cause | Growth | Unity |
Let me consider this as a resolution by which I pledge myself to act in all variety of circumstances and to which I must recur often in times of carelessness and temptation – to measure my conduct by the rule of conscience.
Circumstances | Conduct | Conscience | Resolution | Rule | Temptation | Temptation |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.
Culture |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Emotions | Means | Personality | Poetry |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Tomorrow’s memory depends upon today’s impressions... Your memory builds your personality, your personality builds your character, and your character determines your destiny.
Character | Destiny | Memory | Personality | Tomorrow |
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 |
Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Means | Personality |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
One social structure will be conducive to cooperation and solidarity another social structure to competition, suspiciousness, avarice; another to child-like receptiveness, another to destructive aggressiveness. All empirical forms or human needs and drives have to be understood as results of the social practice (in the last analysis based on the productive forces, class structure, etc., etc.) but they all have to fulfill the functions which are inherent in man’s nature in general, and that is to permit him to relate himself to others and share a common frame of reference, etc. The existential contradiction within man (to which I would now add also the contradiction between limitations which reality imposes on his life, and the virtually limitless imagination which his brain permits him to follow) is what I believe to be one of the motives of psychological and social dynamics. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him. The question then arises whether there is an optimal solution which can be inferred from man’s nature, and which constitutes a potential tendency in man. I believe that such optimal solutions can be inferred from the nature of man, and I have recently found it quite useful to think in terms of what in sociology and economy is now often called »system analysis«. One might start with the idea, in the first place, that human personality — just like society — is a system, that is to say, that each part depends on every other, and no part can be changed unless all or most other parts are also changed. A system is better than chaos. If a society system disintegrates or is destroyed by blows from the outside the society ends in chaos, and a completely new society is built upon its ruins, often using the elements of the destroyed system to build the new. That has happened many times in history. But, what also happens is that the society is not simply destroyed but that the system is changed, and a new system emerges which can be considered to be a transformation of the old one.
Better | Contradiction | Cooperation | Ends | Imagination | Man | Motives | Nature | Personality | Practice | Question | Reality | Society | System | Will | Society | Old | Think |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.
Nothing | People | Personality | Value |