This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this because it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never know until it's too late to do anything about it, how sweet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it for them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given. Every day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.
Bitterness | Day | Effort | Hate | Learning | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Parents | People | Teach | Thinking | Will | World | Understand |
Marva Collins, born Marva Delores Nettles
The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.
Learning |
The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door.
In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
AN INSPIRED LIFE: I HAVE A CHOICE. My key to living an inspired life involves Embracing my history, Understanding the function of expectations and gently learning to have none; Recognizing the power of attentive and conscious choices. In all circumstances I acknowledge this, IN ALL THINGS AND ALL WAYS, I HAVE CHOICE. My choice resides in my perspective. While I certainly do not control climate and markets and roadways and others, I do control myself and my response to all those circumstances. I do indeed.
Choice | Circumstances | Control | Learning | Life | Life | Power |
Marva Collins, born Marva Delores Nettles
I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities.
Learning |
Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.
Age | Art | Imagination | Important | Learning | Life | Life | Love | Relationship | Restraint | Art | Understand |
Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
Human-heartedness is man's mind. Righteousness is man's path. How sad that he abandons that path and does not rely on it; that he loses that mind and does not know to seek it. When a man has lost a cock or a dog, he knows to seek it, but having lost his (proper) mind, he does not know to seek it. The Way of Learning is nothing other than seeking the lost mind.
Learning | Man | Mind | Nothing | Righteousness |
The lesson I was learning involved the idea that I could feel compassion for people without acting on it.
Compassion | Learning | Lesson | People |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Before he can know Who he is, man has to unlearn the mass of illusory knowledge hehas burdened himself with on the interminable journey from unconsciousness to consciousness. It is only through love that you can begin to unlearn, and, eventually, put an end to all that you do not know. God-love penetrates all illusion, while no amount of illusion can dim God-love. Start by learning to love God by beginning to love those whom you cannot. You will find that in serving others you are serving yourself. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the less you remember yourself; and when you completely forget yourself, you find me as the Source of all Love.
Beginning | God | Illusion | Journey | Kindness | Knowledge | Learning | Love | Man | Unconsciousness | Will | God |
Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
The great end of learning is nothing else but to seek for the lost mind.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Through learning we grow, becoming more than we were before, and in that sense learning is unselfish, because it results in the transformation of what we were before, a setting aside of the old self in favor of a more complex one.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences.