This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The fear of living arises most commonly... in the failure to live in complete involvement with what transcends our being.
Prayer, then is radical commitment, a dangerous involvement in the life of God.
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
It is the integrative power of vision-logic, I believe, and not the indissociation of tribal magic or the imperialism of mythic involvement that is deperately needed on a global scale.
Global | Imperialism | Magic | Power |
Marie Curie, fully Marie Skłodowska-Curie, originally Manya Sklodowska
Ignoring the possibility of personal involvement is the first step to panic and tragedy.
Panic |
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce
We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life. ... We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. In the future — not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century — these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.
Culture | Future | Man | Panic | People | Society | Space | Will | Words | Society | Understand |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture. For an adequate formation of a culture, the involvement of the whole man is required, whereby he exercises his creativity, intelligence, and knowledge of the world and of people. Furthermore, he displays his capacity for self-control, personal sacrifice, solidarity and readiness to promote the common good.
Posidonius, aka Posidonius of Rhodes or Posidonius of Apameia (meaning "of Poseidon") NULL
For Posidonius, ouranos, heaven, offers the paradigm for man. The stars teach ethics. The individual who pursues his duties without emotional involvement in them and without the correlative expectation of results, who recognizes honesty as the good and the hallmark of the wise man, and who seeks to honour the higher daimon in himself discovers a fidelity within the soul which is both its overarching oikeiosis and its link to the World-Soul. He sees that the principles of physics can be translated into the laws of psychology from which are derived ethics and the rules of right conduct. Without wavering in his loyalty to the deepest insights of the Stoic tradition, Posidonius exemplified in his own life and thought the ability of the philosopher to penetrate afresh and more precisely the mystery of the kosmos and the less ordered realm in which human beings dwell. His fearlessness of method and the marriage of observation and abstract thought influenced the generations which came immediately after him, and inspired a number of thinkers in the dawn of the European Enlightenment. [paraphrased]
Ability | Abstract | Dawn | Ethics | Expectation | Fidelity | Good | Honesty | Individual | Life | Life | Loyalty | Loyalty | Marriage | Method | Mystery | Observation | Principles | Psychology | Right | Soul | Stoic | Teach | Thinkers | Thought | Wavering | Wise | Expectation | Thought |
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.
Red Skelton, fully Richard Bernard "Red" Skelton
Today's comics use four-letter words as a shortcut to thinking. They're shooting for that big laugh and it becomes a panic thing, using four-letter words to shock people.
If, on the other hand, there are no traces of God's involvement in the universe; if God did indeed set things up so that life would evolve, but covered His tracks so brilliantly that no clues remain; if He made the universe look exactly as it would be expected to look if He did not exist, then what we have is not an argument from design at all. There can be no argument from design if the universe is expertly designed to look undesigned. All we are left with, in this case, is the feeble, though strictly valid, argument that just because we can't find any evidence for a God, this doesn't prove that there isn't one. Of course we can't prove that there isn't a God but, as has been said sufficiently often before, exactly the same can be said of fairies and Father Christmas.
Argument | Design | Evidence | Father | God | Life | Life | Universe | God |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,00 available, more if necessary; full-time job
We're entering a whole new era now. America has suffered a terrorist attack of historic proportions, and now we're going to go after the perpetrators. Cyber-attacks may be inevitable... Physical and cyber-attacks in conjunction could cause panic across a whole economic sector.
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
A woman's dream of taking it away, like a tiger cub to take away.
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.
Action | Intuition | Opposition | Rest | Society | Truth | Wisdom | Work | Society |
It takes heroic humility to be yourself.
Action | Criticism | Panic | Preference | World |
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the newness, the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
Experience | God | Illusion | Light | Lord | Panic | Self | Self-deception | Truth | God |