This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof
Truth only is prolific. Error, sterile in itself, produces only by means of the portion of truth which it contains. It may have offspring, but the life which it gives, like that of the hybrid races, cannot be transmitted.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
The life of any one can by no means be changed after death; an evil life can in no wise be converted into a good life, or an infernal into an angelic life; because every spirit, from head to foot, is of the character of love, and, therefore, of his life; and to convert this life into its opposite would be to destroy the spirit utterly.
Character | Death | Destroy | Evil | Good | Life | Life | Love | Means | Spirit | Wisdom | Wise |
Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon
I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our ‘at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances.
Lionel Stander, fully Lionel Jay Stander
Anyone who lives within his means suffers from lack of imagination.
Imagination | Means | Wisdom |
Only awareness can free us from our thoughts. In the moment we become aware that our thoughts are just thoughts, rather than reality itself, we wake up from their spell and can return to presence. It is empowering to dispel and can return to presence. It is empowering to discover that we are not enslaved by our thoughts, by how our mind interprets reality.
Barbara Mary Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, Lady Robert Jackson
To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral operatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.
Greed | Knowledge | Means | Respect | Survival | Wisdom | Respect |
Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Usually people interested in spiritual development think in terms of the importance of mind, that mysterious, high and deep thing that we have decided to learn about. But strangely enough, the profound and the transcendental are to be found in the factory. It may not fill you with bliss to look at it, it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we have read about, but somehow reality is to be found there in the way in which we relate with everyday problems. If we relate to them in a simple, earthy way, we will work in a more balanced manner, and things will be dealt with properly.
Enough | Good | Mind | People | Problems | Reality | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Work | Learn | Think |
It is by thought that has aroused my intellect from its slumbers, which has “given lustre to virtue, and dignity to truth,” or by those examples which have inflamed my soul with the love of goodness, and not by means of sculptured marble, that I hold communion with Shakespeare and Milton, with Johnson and Burke, with Howard and Wilberforce.
Dignity | Love | Means | Soul | Thought | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Intellect | Thought |
All societies create their own worlds, using language and folklore to impose an arbitrary order on the complexity of the cosmos. This ordering of reality helps make sense of things by interpreting information in ways which are compatible with what is already known.
Just as divine truth is what God orders and produces as He comes to know it, so human truth is what man arranges and makes as he knows it. In this way knowledge is cognition of the genus or mode by which a thing is made, and by means of which, as the mind comes to know the mode, because it arranges the elements, it makes the thing. Divine truth is solid because God grasps all things; human truth is two-dimensional because man grasps the externals of things.
God | Knowledge | Man | Means | Mind | Truth | Wisdom | God |
If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable.
Eternal | Intelligence | Knowledge | Memory | Mind | Reality | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Thought |
Wealth is not acquired, as many persons supposed, by fortunate speculations and splendid enterprises, but by the daily practice of industry, frugality, and economy. He who relies upon these means will rarely be found destitute, and he who relies upon any other will generally become bankrupt.
Frugality | Industry | Means | Practice | Wealth | Will | Wisdom |
As long as we, in philosophy, ask questions concerning reality, while we are bound in the illusion of our relative standpoint, and then try to deal with these faculty questions by means of the intellect, which is the mind functioning in the realm of relativity, it is quite impossible to come to a realization of living truth.
Illusion | Means | Mind | Philosophy | Reality | Truth | Wisdom |
Perception is based, to a very large extent, on conceptual models - which are always inadequate, often incomplete and sometimes profoundly wrong. This complex situation arose because signals from the environment itself can be inadequate. The sort of information we need is not always available. And so, knowledge from the past, mixed up with assumptions about that knowledge which may be more or less appropriate, are used to augment information provided by the senses. Which means that our perception of any situation depends only partly on sensory signals being received at that time. And it is only a very short step from there, to perception which occurs in the absence of all immediate signals and has to be labeled “extrasensory”.
Absence | Knowledge | Means | Need | Past | Perception | Time | Wisdom | Wrong |