This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person... Love is an attitude which determines how we relate to the world... Love is an activity of our spirit... Loving others is impossible until we love ourselves.
Character | Love | Relationship | Spirit | World |
A person who tries to keep everything about himself hidden will not have close friends. Building a close relationship with others requires self-disclosure.
Character | Relationship | Self | Will |
From their own experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Character | Experience | History | Men | Learn |
We may begin with considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally bound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature.
Character | Feelings | Force | Men | Nature | Rest | Sympathy |
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Personal relationships are a major cause of unhappiness... Trying to find successful ways of dealing with people according to their personality traits is futile and time-consuming, and it puts the emphasis on outer characteristics rather than where it belongs, which is on the inner... There is an underlying sameness to us all... Operating from the space-time continuum, it is too easy to see others as different from us, to see boundaries, to be exclusive. Operating from our spiritual center, however, is to see others as part of ourselves, to see no boundaries, to be inclusive.
Cause | Character | People | Personality | Space | Time | Unhappiness |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
It is easy to look down on others; to look down on others is the difficulty.
Character | Difficulty |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
Men almost always walk in the paths trodden by others proceeding in their actions by imitation.
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
There are three classes [kinds] of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.