This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lives can be changed if you say the right thing at the right time at the right place with the right spirit… Words of encouragement, spoken or written, have a dramatic effect on a person…Well-intended words, even though they are correct, can damage relationships if they are not perceived as being offered with good will.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
However complex the background of a so-called meaningful life, the meaning itself is directly experienced. And the ultimate ground or place of meaning arising is the individual human being, in the specific situations of his or her life. While the sources of meaning are almost predictably outside the individual self, the experiences of meaningfulness are necessarily someone’s experiences.
Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Self |
Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt
All spiritual growth takes place by leaps and bounds, both in the individual and, as here, in the community. The crisis is to be regarded as a nexus of growth.
Growth | Individual | Crisis |
The possibilities of our future are actually determined by collective choices in the present. The evidence simply states that the choice of many people, focused in a specific manner, has a direct and measurable effect on our quality of life. Quantum physics suggests that by redirecting our focus – where we place our attention – we bring a new course of events into focus while at the same time releasing an existing course of events that may no longer serve us.
Attention | Choice | Events | Evidence | Focus | Future | Life | Life | People | Present | Time |
One should never place confidence in the future--it doesn't deserve it.
Confidence | Future |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.
Beauty | Destroy | Earth | Growth | Individual | Man | Society | Beauty |
William Bridges, fully Sir William Throsby Bridges
Change occurs when something new starts or something old stops, and it takes place at a particular point in time. But transition cannot be localized in time that way, since it is the gradual . . . process through which individuals and groups reorient themselves. Change often starts with a new beginning, but transition must start with an ending--with people letting go of old attitudes and behaviors.
Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
The world is the book where eternal Wisdom wrote its own ideas, and the living temple where, depicting its own acts and likeness, it decorated the height and the depth with living statues; so that every spirit, to guard against profanity, should read and contemplate here art and government, and each should say: “I fill the universe, seeing God in all things.” But we, souls bound to books and dead temples, copied with many mistakes from the living, place these things before such instruction. O ills, quarrels, ignorance, labors, pains, make us aware of our falling away: O let us, in God’s name, return to the original.
Art | Books | Eternal | God | Government | Ideas | Ignorance | Spirit | Universe | Wisdom | World | Art | God |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is between one person and another is emptiness, nothingness, a space or field in which we can meet, talk, love, hate, hurt, nurture, encourage, and otherwise engage in ethically significant activity with one another. The between is the place wherein we are able to interact with one another, and it is a field of possibility, an opportunity as much as an emptiness to fill. Leaving the notion of emptiness to one side for the present, the betweenness of men and women works itself out in the way called “ethics,” which occasions and is the description of the consensual rules and structures of social existence.
Ethics | Existence | Hate | Love | Men | Opportunity | Present | Space |
We may therefore further regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense… There is no place in this new kind of physics for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.
Naturalistic determinism has not yet found a place for the concept of individual responsibility.
The present moment is never intolerable. It is always what is coming in five minutes or five days that makes people despair. The Law of Life is to live in the present, and this applies to both time and place. Keep your attention to the present moment, and in the place where your body is now.
Attention | Body | Despair | Law | Life | Life | People | Present | Time |
A grand meta-narrative is a story of the development and purpose of human history in which we as individual can find a place and play a role. Four basic meta-narratives: (1) Platonic Christian is the idea of life as a journey to another unchanging realm. (2) Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of the consciousness of God. (3) Marx’s notion of another revolution ushering in a new era. (4) Nietzsche’s idea that there is no “beyond” and that the only meaning comes through creative activities through which we shape a life for ourselves.
Consciousness | Era | God | History | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Story |
Consciousness, according to some, is a useless epiphenomenon, a noticeable but ineffectual side effect of causally more interesting processes taking place within the system.
Consciousness | System |
Spiritual progress must be slow as long as we are worried, frightened, resentful, sick, or discouraged – and those things can be overcome only through prayer. It is a duty and a joy to help others, wisely, and to leave the world a better place than we found it – and we can do that only through prayer. The more we pray for ourselves the more power will our prayers have for any other purpose whatsoever; so we see that praying for ourselves is the reverse of selfishness – it is truly glorifying God.
Better | Duty | God | Joy | Power | Prayer | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Selfishness | Will | World |