This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Deep ecology is supported by modern science... but it is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation. When the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual.
Awareness | Change | Consciousness | Individual | Life | Life | Oneness | Perception | Reality | Science | Sense | Spirit | Awareness |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.
Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
All perception of truth is a perception of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our heads.
Perception | Reason | Truth |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
Beauty | Perception | Beauty |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Action from principle, the perception and performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.
Action | Individual | Perception | Right |
In order to arrive at the reality of outer objects I have just as little need to resort to inference as I have in regard to the reality of the object of my inner sense, that is, in regard to the reality of my thoughts. For in both cases alike the objects are nothing but represenations, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is at the same time a sufficient proof of their reality.
Consciousness | Little | Need | Nothing | Object | Order | Perception | Reality | Regard | Sense | Time |
Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.
Change | Perception | Story | World |
The world is a single whole. Everything is linked with everything else. The world 'sounds'. It is a 'chord'. The imagination and freedom necessary for feeling, experiencing, and living through - rather than merely knowing - these are more likely to be associated with an ana-logical process of perception than with logical thinking. Logic aims at security. The ana-logician has the courage to embark on risk and adventure. Logic is goal-oriented and passes judgment. Analogy ponders and establishes relationships. The logician sees. The ana-logician listens... The eye glimpses surfaces and is attached to them, always remaining superficial (on the surface). The ear penetrates deep into the realms it investigates through hearing.
Adventure | Aims | Courage | Freedom | Imagination | Judgment | Knowing | Logic | Perception | Risk | Security | Thinking | World |
I can never feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its beauty.
Beauty | Perception | Truth |
John A. Marshall, fully John Aloysius Marshall
Words like "really," "absolute," "fact," and the like should be stricken from the dictionary, as they all require every person to have the same perception of things. Not only is that not preferable, it may not even be possible.
Absolute | Perception | Words |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Everything morally right derives from one of four sources: it concerns either full perception or intelligent development of what is true; or the preservation of organized society, where every man is rendered his due and all his obligations are faithfully discharged; or the greatness and strength of a noble, invincible spirit; or order and moderation in everything said and done, whereby there is temperance and self-control.
Control | Greatness | Man | Moderation | Order | Perception | Right | Self | Self-control | Society | Spirit | Strength | Moderation |
The perception of one’s fellow man as a whole, as a unity, as a unique – even if his wholeness, unity, and uniqueness are only partly developed, as is usually the case – is opposed in our time by almost everything that is commonly understood as specifically modern. In our time there predominates an analytical, reductive, and deriving look between man and man. This look is analytical, or rather pseudo-analytical, since it treats the whole being as put together and therefore able to be taken apart… An effort is being made today radically to destroy the mystery between man and man. The personal life, the ever-near mystery, once the source of the stillest enthusiasms, is leveled down.
Destroy | Effort | Life | Life | Man | Mystery | Perception | Time | Unique | Unity | Wholeness |
Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
Even at the depths of the 1930s Depression, which was objectively much worse than today, people were never hopeless the way they are today. Most people felt it's going to get better, we can do something about it, we can organize, we can work. Today what people mainly feel is, it's going to get worse, and there's nothing we can do about it. So what we're faced with is a combination of a very high degree of disillusionment, and a very low degree of hope and perception of alternatives. And that's exactly where serious organizers ought to be able to step in.
Better | Depression | Disillusionment | Hope | Nothing | People | Perception | Work |
Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
We have to find ways to unlearn those things that screen us from the perception of profound truth. We have to achieve the child's unknowing because we have been made so smart.
Perception | Truth |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Seek God for His own sake. The highest perception is to feel Him as Bliss, welling up from your infinite depths. Don’t yearn for visions, spiritual phenomena, or thrilling experiences. The path to the Divine is not a circus!
God | Perception | Phenomena | God |
The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.
Enough | Greatness | Perception | Virtue | Virtue |
The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.
Enough | Greatness | Justice | Need | Perception | Plenty | Poverty | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |
Trust thyself. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
Age | Eternal | Events | Genius | Heart | Men | Perception | Providence | Society | Trust | Society |