This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A new challenge awaits us at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to go beyond fragmentation, to go beyond the incompatible sets of values held even by serious-minded people, to mature beyond the self-righteousness of one’s accepted approaches and be open to total living and total revolution. In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success. There is no question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation.
Awareness | Beginning | Individual | Life | Life | Oneness | Religion | Wholeness | Awareness | Understand | Value |
We will discover that there are systems and structures that inevitably lead to aggression, exploitation, and war. We have accepted aggression as a way of living. We create and entrench ourselves in structures which culminate in wars. Retaining the structures and avoiding wars is not possible. You and I as individuals have to realize how we are responsible, how we cooperate with the systems and thereby participate in the violence and wars. And then we must begin to inquire whether we can discontinue cooperating with the systems, whether we can stop participating in wars, and explore alternative ways of living for ourselves.
Action | Happy | Individual | Responsibility | Society | Tomorrow | Society | Value |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
We have moved very far away from love in our collective lives, dangerously near destruction, close to starvation. Perhaps we have the wisdom now, the awareness that love is as essential to human beings as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Love is the beauty, the delicate mystery, the soul of life, the radiant unspoiled purity that brings spontaneous joy, songs of ecstasy, poems, paintings, dances, dramas to celebrate its indescribable, never-to-be-fully-captured bliss of being. Can we bring love into the marketplaces, into the homes, the schools, the places of business, and transform them completely? You may call it a utopian challenge, but it is the only one that will make a significant difference or that is fully worthy of the potential of whole human beings.
Motives | Nations | People | Relationship | Wonder | Value |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
Value |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Critic | Feelings | Important | Life | Life | Worship | Value |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Don’t try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Only noise makes mistakes. Silence never makes mistakes.
Self-knowledge | Value |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The only difference in sleeping people is the way they snore.
Value |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it.
Acceptance | Agony | Contentment | Man | Noise | People | Quiet | Words | Wrong | Value |
Meaning is different from explanation and it certainly isn’t blame (no shame no blame really helps with seeing clearly, no?) I asked, “What is the cancer trying to tell me?” What is the story of this tumor? How does it fit into the narrative of my life?” The cancer seemed sweet to me. Well meaning. It was trying to hold all the undigested feelings and experiences I had raced right past in my headstrong, headlong race to save the world. She (the tumor felt like a little girl) became beloved. I owned her as my creation – not as my fault but as my perfectly crafted, unconscious, possibly deadly solution to the complex equation of my life. In one bundle it took on the world’s toxicity and my own reaction to it.
Focus | Fulfillment | Marriage | Value |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic the self-transcendence of human existence. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
Achievement | Dignity | Happy | Inconsistency | Man | People | Present | Sense | Society | Usefulness | Society | Old | Value |
Says Nanak, the Truth has been revealed to me. The Guru has given me the treasure; I have taken it and enshrined it within my heart.
Hardly anyone loves the Lord's Name; how rare is that place which is in bloom.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
We are not greatly pleased that our friends should respect our good qualities if they venture to perceive our faults.