This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
Optimism is just a useful adjunct to wisdom. By itself it cannot provide meaning. Optimism is a tool to help the individual achieve the goals he has set for himself. It is in the choice of the goals themselves that meaning - or emptiness - resides. When learned optimism is coupled with a renewed commitment to the commons [common good], our epidemic of depression and meaninglessness may end.
Choice | Commitment | Depression | Goals | Good | Individual | Meaning | Optimism | Wisdom |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.
Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |
The moment you commit and quit holding back, all sorts of unforseen incidents, meetings and material assistance will rise up to help you. The simple act of commitment is a powerful magnet for help
Commitment | Will |
Sharpen your thinking about goal setting. Be realistic about the amount of time and effort that might be necessary. Make a commitment to excellence. Learn to distinguish between a goal and a wish. Prepare for ultimate goals by achieving your interim goals. Choose goals that will benefit others as well as yourself.
Commitment | Distinguish | Effort | Excellence | Goals | Thinking | Time | Will | Learn |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellectual - simply a confession of failures.
Consistency | Life | Life |
The dispute between the theory of a predestined future and the theory of a free future is an endless dispute. This is so because both theories are too literal, too rigid, too material, and the one excludes the other... The opposites are both equally wrong because the truth lies in the unification of these two opposite understandings into one whole. At any given moment all the future of the world is predestined and existing - provided no new factor comes in. And a new factor can only come in from the side of consciousness and the will resulting from it.
Consciousness | Dispute | Future | Theories | Truth | Will | World | Wrong |
I have a theory of power: That if it's going to be responsible, it has to have something to lose.
Power |
Faith is belief, and belief has, over and above its intellectual character, an aspect of irmness, persistence, and subjective certainty.
Belief | Character | Faith | Persistence |
The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.
Absence | Appearance | Life | Life | Practice | Reconciliation |
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.
Labor | Man | Nature | Patience | Promptness | Property | Right | Thought | Thought |
Man was born to be rich, or grows rich by the use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.
Labor | Man | Nature | Patience | Promptness | Property | Right | Thought | Thought |
If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels.