This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All men seek one goal: success or happiness. The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal - a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends - wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.
Ends | Means | Men | Money | Service | Society | Success | Wisdom |
Giving much thought to the future is vain. Only one task is worthy of the doing and that is to express the Here and Now. And to express means building, out of the infinite diversity of the Here and Now, a visage dominating it. It means shaping silence out of stones. Any other claim is but an ado of words that weave the wind.
Diversity | Future | Giving | Means | Silence | Thought | Words | Thought |
Wealth obviously is not the good we seek, for the sole purpose it serves is to provide the means for getting something else, pleasure, virtue and honor would have better title to be considered the good for they are to be desired for their account.
Better | Good | Honor | Means | Pleasure | Purpose | Purpose | Title | Virtue | Virtue | Wealth |
Your values are your belief systems about right and wrong, good and bad. Our values are the things we all fundamentally need to move toward... Our values change when we change goals or self-image... There is no real success except in keeping your basic values.
Belief | Change | Goals | Good | Need | Right | Self | Success | Wrong |
Some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by teaching... but the soul of the student must first have been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred... The character, then, must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble and hating what is base.
Character | Good | Joy | Means | Nature | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Think |
Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters and musicians.
Aesthetic | Art | Genius | Learning | Little | Respect | Virtue | Virtue | Respect |
Arthur Compton, fully Arthur Holly Compton
I should be inclined to claim that the person who limits his interests to the means of living without consideration of the content or meaning of his life is defeating God's great purpose when he brought into existence a creature with the intelligence and godlike powers that are found in man. It is in living wisely and fully that one's soul grows.
Consideration | Existence | God | Intelligence | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Means | Purpose | Purpose | Soul |
Many have declared the ultimate truth openly: that only the self is, that you are nothing other than the Self, that the universe is a mere manifestation of the Self, without inherent reality, existing only in the Self. This can be understood by the analogy of a dream. The whole dream-world with all its people and events exist only in the mind of the dreamer. Its creation or emergence takes nothing away from him, and its dissolution or reabsorption adds nothing to him; he remains the same before, during, and after. God, the conscious Dreamer of the cosmic dream, is the Self, and no person in the dream has any reality apart from the Self of which he is an expression. By discarding the illusion of otherness, you can realize that identity with the Self which always was, is, and will be, beyond the conditions of life and time. Then, since you are One with the Dreamer, the whole universe, including your life and all others, is your dream and none of the events in it have more than a dream reality. You are set free from hope and desire, fear and frustration, and established in the unchanging Bliss of Pure Being.
Desire | Events | Fear | God | Hope | Illusion | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | People | Reality | Self | Time | Truth | Universe | Will | World |
What cosmic reality is it that love demonstrates? The essential quality of every act of love is to bring the apparently discrete into a relationship of unity
Love | Reality | Relationship | Unity |
Mystery is not the denial of reason but its honest confirmation: reason, indeed, leaves inevitability to mystery… mystery and reality are the two halves of the same sphere.
Of all “evils” death is the most feared although it is the fate of all creatures. It is so natural that reason tells us it must be good. Death is not lifelessness, but life in motion. Our essential being cannot die because it was never born. Only its representations appear and disappear in the chronological sequences we call incarnations. If death is the prelude to life in other forms it ceases to be “evil” but becomes the means for releasing consciousness is that it may express itself in other and more diverse fields.
Consciousness | Death | Evil | Fate | Good | Life | Life | Means | Reason | Fate |
The alternative to the illusion of an ego is the Reality of inexhaustible, radiant Being. So long as the appearance of an ego remains, so long does the appearance of free will; in fact they are mutually dependent.
The way of exoteric religion is to progressively replace egoism by submission to the will of God. Its four cardinal demands are faith, love, humility, and good deeds. In so far as they are complied with, they effectively bring a man towards Self-realization, even though he does not consciously envisage this. True, the Goal is not likely to be attained in this lifetime, but in God’s patience a lifetime is very little. Faith strengthens the intuitional conviction of the reality of God or the Self. Humility, its counterpart, weakens the belief in the ego and lessens the importance attached to it. Love strives to surrender the ego to God and its welfare to others. Good deeds deny egoism in practice and are alike the fruit and proof of love and humility.
Belief | Deeds | Ego | Faith | God | Good | Humility | Little | Love | Man | Patience | Practice | Reality | Religion | Self | Self-realization | Submission | Surrender | Will | Deeds | God |