This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
Not only should we be unashamed of grief, confident that its expression will not permanently hurt us, but we should also possess the wisdom to talk about our loss and through that creative conversation with friends and companions begin to reconstruct the broken fragments of our lives... should not resist the sympathy and stimulation of social interaction. We should learn not to grow impatient with the slow healing process of time . . . We should anticipate these stages in our emotional convalescence: unbearable pain, poignant grief, empty days, resistance to consolation, disinterestedness in life, gradually giving way under the healing sunlight of love,friendship, social challange, to the new weaving of a pattern of action and the acceptance of the irresistible challenge of life.
Acceptance | Action | Challenge | Conversation | Giving | Sympathy | Time | Will | Wisdom | Loss | Friends | Learn |
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, fully Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
I recognize nothing that is not material. In physics, chemistry and biology I see only mechanics. The Universe is nothing but an infinite and complex mechanism. Its complexity is so great that it borders on randomness, giving the illusion of free will.
Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL
As a human being puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.
Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.
Control | Ego | Giving | Loneliness | Means | Property | Relationship | Superiority | Will | World |
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
Larry Bird, fully Larry Joe Bird
Leadership is getting players to believe in you. If you tell a teammate you're ready to play as tough as you're able to, you'd better go out there and do it. Players will see right through a phony. And they can tell when you're not giving it all you've got.
Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.
Age | Culture | Giving | Literature | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Will | Writing | Thought |
Healthy parenting is nothing if not a process of empowerment. As we help to raise our children's self-esteem, we also increase their personal power. When we encourage them to be confident, self-reliant, self-directed, and responsible individuals, we are giving them power.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to comply with their orders. It forces all those engaged in production to the utmost exertion in the service of the consumers. It makes competition work. He who best serves the consumers profits most and accumulates riches.
Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.
Better | Earth | Eternal | Faith | Giving | Imagination | Life | Life | Man | Reason | Trust |
M. C. Swabey, fully Marie Taylor Collins Swabey
While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.
Events | Giving | Important | Light | Men | Past | Present | Time |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
Spend your brief moment according to nature’s law, and serenely greet the journey’s end as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and giving thanks to the tree that gave it life.
Giving |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
There is no brew so deadly that it cannot at certain moments become precious and invigorating by giving us just the stimulus that was necessary, the warmth that we cannot generate ourselves.
Giving |