This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
O that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!
We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.
Age | Experience | Knowledge | Memory |
Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
These, characteristically different from one another and variously modified by the gunas, present to the intellect (buddhi) the whole purpose of the Self (purusha), illumining it like a lamp.
Experience | Nature | Pain | Self | Suffering |
Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL
We should practice wisdom during our daily work, during interacting with annoying people, performing tiresome duties, looking after parents or sick relatives, ... if someone neglects these duties, but excels in his study of Zen, he is vastly off the mark.
Doubt | Experience | Will |
Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
We can never see the world other than incompletely: deliberately to see it as incomplete is to create an artistic aspect.
Experience | Genius | Knowing |
Isn't there a picture that belongs in the original frame? Life [one suspects she means spiritual life] cannot die. You can explode its dynamism [the physical body] but you cannot dissipate its energy. If you suffer where life suffered, the essence that once filled the frame will take from you something to dramatize and live again.
Eternal | Experience | Knowledge | Prediction |
God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.
Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite...
Chance | Divinity | Earth | Experience | Life | Life | Pain | Purpose | Purpose | Search | Suffering |
If you do not know where you are or what clan you are, how will you find the balance?
Experience | Truth |
I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.
Divinity | Experience | Understand |
I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
Accomplishment | Beauty | Experience | Means | Need | Nothing | Order | Beauty |
My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homonculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was.
Awareness | Experience | Life | Life | Awareness |
Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Beauty | Excellence | Experience | Pleasure | Trust | Will | World | Excellence | Beauty |