This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Do what you are doing now, suffer what you are suffering now; to do all this with holiness, nothing need be changed but your hearts. Sanctity consists in willing what happens to us by God’s order.
Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel their suffering in our hearts. More and more people have seen that appeal and felt it in their hearts. All around the world there is an awakening of understanding and compassion, and understanding that reaches out to help the suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. That embraces hungry, sick, and desperate human beings, people who are starving while the fortunate among us have so much more than we need. And if, one by one, we help them, the hurting animals, the desperate humans, then together we shall alleviate so much of the hunger, fear, and pain in the world. Together we can bring change to the world, gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all living beings.
Awakening | Change | Compassion | Fear | Love | Pain | People | Suffering | Understanding | World |
Muriel seeks happiness and beauty. Dan informs her that life is a balance between the two, between suffering and laughter, beauty and ugliness. 'There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death. Not happy, Muriel. Say that you have tried to make them CREATE.
Balance | Beauty | Joy | Life | Life | Suffering | Beauty | Happiness |
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
The magic of listening brings us closer to the central core of the universe. To begin to comprehend the mystery of life it is not sufficient to touch and to see – we need to hear, to listen, and thus to unite heart and mind and soul. The softer the sound the more important it is that we perceive it. We have, I fear, become a deaf people, and the cries of pain of the flora and fauna around us, the very air we breathe, the suffering of our fellow human beings in our urban deserts, in parts of the globe we have subjected to war, to famine and flood through greed and selfishness, have become inaudible. The media encourages us to read, to view, to hear, but that does not mean we listen. Until we can create a still center within ourselves we will be unable to attune the “third ear” to the messages that are broadcast to us, loud and clear for the most part, but rendered futile due to our incapacity to listen.
Greed | Heart | Important | Life | Life | Listening | Magic | Mind | Mystery | Need | Pain | Sound | Suffering | Will |
Jean Grou, fully Jean Nicholas Grou
The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.
In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential fashion. "I'll get enlightened first, and then I'll engage in social action." Those who are not engaged in spiritual pursuits put it differently: "I'll get my head straight first, I'll get psychoanalyzed, I'll overcome my inhibitions or neuroses or my hang-ups (whatever description you give to samsara) and then I'll wade into the fray." Presupposing that world and self are essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one before healing the other. This stance conveys the impression that human consciousness inhabits some haven, or locker-room, independent of the collective situation -- and then trots onto the playing field when it is geared up and ready.
Consciousness | Impression | Impulse | Self | Suffering | World |
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
To love all mankind, from the greatest to the lowest, a cheerful state of being is required; but in order to see into mankind, into life, and still more into ourselves, suffering is requisite.
John Ciardi, fully John Anthony Ciardi
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
Adolescence | Enough | Suffering |
Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too much, we no longer imagine; and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless.
Death | Imagination | Suffering |
Jerome K. Jerome, fully Jerome Klapka Jerome
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.
You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.
From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone — an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.
Capacity | Danger | Dependence | Illusion | Individual | Insanity | Power | Suffering | Will | Danger |
John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.
Behavior | Indignation | Little | Man | Torture |
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”
Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.
Detachment | Suffering |
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando, born Joseph Marie Degérando, also Joseph-Marie de Gérando
The seal of suffering impressed upon our destiny announces in clear characters our high calling.