This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
Pain in the human world is the birth of personality, its fight for its own nature.
Birth | Nature | Pain | Personality | World |
Parents belong to the world of the past; children belong to the world of the future. Both share the world of the present, but neither can enter or fully understand the other’s world and time. It is easier to communicate across miles than across years. We meet and laugh awhile; we separate and grieve awhile. And then we remember.
Children | Future | Parents | Past | Present | Time | World | Understand |
Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into real improvement of living conditions.
Better | Children | Fighting | Future | Ideas | Improvement | Men | Order | Peace | People | Progress | Struggle | Words |
One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about.
Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
We can flow along with the mainstream of a culture that does not serve us well – does not really make us comfortable, does not really make us safe; but only offers illusions of happiness, comfort, safety – or we can begin the oftentimes prickly work of searching our own hearts, of asking who and what we love, who and what we feel strongly enough about to change our lives for, to fight for, to live for.
Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones
Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Hell |
John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick
To see the world as being ruled by a divine love which sets infinite value upon each individual and includes all men in its scope, and yet to live as though the world were a realm of chance in which each must fight for his own interests against the rest, argues a very dim and wavering vision of God’s rule.
Chance | God | Individual | Love | Men | Rest | Rule | Vision | Wavering | World | Value |
Golda Meir, originally named Goldie Mabovitch, later Goldie Myerson
Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.
Heart |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.
Earnestness | Life | Life | Zeal |
Rinzai, aka Lin- Chi Yi-Sen, Lin-chi I-hsuan, Rinzai Gigen, Venerable Master Lin Chi NULL
When hungry I eat; when tired, I sleep. Fools laugh at me. The wise understand.
Wise |
We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate.
I’m learning the difference between humor and comedy, between the laugh that lasts forever and the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the air. Humor is giving, and comedy is taking away. Humor is companionable, comedy cold. Humor is character, comedy personality.
Character | Comedy | Giving | Humor | Learning | Personality |