This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
What a superlatively grand and consoling idea is that of death! Without this radiant idea - this delightful morning star, indicting that the luminary of eternity is going to rise, life would, to my view, darken into midnight melancholy. The expectation of living here, and living thus always, would be indeed a prospect of overwhelming despair. But thanks to that fatal decree that dooms us to die; thanks to that gospel which opens the vision of an endless life; and thanks above all to that Saviour friend who has promised to conduct the faithful through the sacred trance of death, into scenes of Paradise and everlasting delight.
Conduct | Death | Despair | Eternity | Expectation | Friend | Life | Life | Melancholy | Paradise | Sacred | Vision | Expectation |
Great souls forgive not injuries till time has put their enemies within their power, that they may show forgiveness is their own.
Forgiveness | Power | Time | Forgiveness | Forgive |
When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.
Circumstances | Men |
The willingness to harm or hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness of our own clinging and rejecting, and a willingness to grapple with these mind states, however painful the encounter, can free us from this circle of suffering. Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest.
Fear | Harm | Ideals | Means | Mind | Mindfulness | Practice | Responsibility | Self | Self-interest | Suffering | Vision | Understand |
Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.
Compassion leaves an indelible blueprint of the recognition that life so sorely needs between one individual and another; one nation and another; one culture and another. It is also valid for the road which our spirit should be building now for crossing the historical abyss that still separates us from a truly contemporary vision of life, and the increase of life and meaning that awaits us in the future.
Compassion | Culture | Future | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Spirit | Vision |
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
I will destroy my enemies by converting them to friends.
Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with enemies of humanity.
Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one's daydream to its natural consummation, although if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
Knowledge and history are the enemies of religion.
No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.
Will |
Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after his is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought - the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.
Joy | Men | Power | Thought | Vision | Will | World | Thought |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Our worst enemies are those we carry about with us in our own hearts.
Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for--because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything.
Vision |
Education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes… But our present argument indicates that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body.
Argument | Body | Darkness | Education | Knowledge | Light | People | Power | Present | Reality | Soul | Vision |
Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL
That which destroyeth a vision is the veil over it.
Vision |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
We have to depend on our enemies to hear the truth.
Truth |