This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
In that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass; and this section is precisely that which we call the material world. Our bodies occupies its centre; it is, in this material world, that part of which we directly feel the flux; in its actual state the actuality of our present lies.
Perception | Present | Reality | Wisdom | World |
Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communication coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones they see on the screen, and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The “TV child”... gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him.... If, later in life, this block of solid inertia is not removed, the emotional isolation from others that starts in front of TV may continue... This being seduced into passivity and discouraged about facing life actively on one’ sown is the real danger of TV.
Ability | Children | Danger | Day | Isolation | Life | Life | Meaning | Personality | Reality | Wisdom | Danger | Inertia | Learn |
There is no sense of weariness like that which closes a day of eager and unintermitted pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten and the core sticks in the throat. Expectation has given way to ennui, and appetite to satiety.
Appetite | Day | Ennui | Expectation | Pleasure | Satiety | Sense | Wisdom | Expectation |
Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
Conquer thyself. Till you hast done this, thou are but a slave; for it is almost as well to be subjected to another's appetite as to thine own.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
Naked reality would scarcely keep the world in motion.
Victor Daniels, aka Chief Thundercloud
We must learn to tailor our concepts to fit reality, instead of trying to stuff reality into our concepts.
John Cudahy, fully John Clarence Cudahy
If these distracted times prove anything, they prove that the greatest illusion is reliance upon the security and permanence of material possessions. We must search for some other coin. And we will discover that the treasure-house of education has stood intact and unshaken in the storm. The man of cultivated life has founded his house upon a rock. You can never take away the magnificent mansion of his mind.
Education | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Possessions | Search | Security | Will | Wisdom |
Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread; they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end.