This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Shaull, fully Reverend M. Richard Shaull
The use of religion, psychoanalysis, or the mass media, as instruments by which people are helped to adjust to a dehumanizing social order without being challenged to change it, is essentially a betrayal of man.
Betrayal | Change | Man | Order | People | Psychoanalysis | Religion |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
There is no better means of arriving at a knowledge of our passions than to examine the difference which exists between soul and body in order to know to which of the two we must attribute each one of the functions which are within us.
Isaac Newton, fully Sir Isaac Newton
As the order of the parts of time is immutable, so also is the order of the parts of space... All things are placed in time as to order of succession; and in space as to order of situation. It is from their essence or nature that they are places; and that the primary places of things should be movable, is absurd. These are therefore the absolute places; and translations out of those places, are the only absolute motions.
Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth. Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.
Absolute | Doctrine | Knowledge | Life | Life | Means | Order | Practice | Present | Reality | Receive | Thought | Truth | World | Learn | Think | Thought |
There are some people who believe that they will enter the Kingdom of God, or the Pure Land, after they die. I don’t agree with them. I know that you don’t have to die in order to get into the Kingdom of God. In fact, you have to be alive to do so.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.
Culture |
Suzanne LaFollette, fully Suzanne Clara La Follette
People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live.
Order | People | Revolution |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
No poet, no artist, of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
Aesthetic | Appreciation | Art | Contrast | Criticism | Meaning | Necessity | Order | Work | Appreciation | Art | Value |
It has become a kind of habit to look at things with the intention of getting something. We call it “pragmatism,” and we say that the truth is something that pays. If we meditate in order to get to the truth, it seems we will be well paid. In meditation, we stop, and we look deeply. We stop just to be there, to be with ourselves and with the world. When we are capable of stopping, we begin to see and, if we can see, we understand. Peace and happiness are the fruit of this process. We should master the art of stopping in order to really be with our friend and with the flower.
Art | Friend | Habit | Intention | Meditation | Order | Peace | Pragmatism | Truth | Will | World | Art | Happiness |
Chopping wood is meditation. Carrying water is meditation. Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness. Each act is a rite, a ceremony. Raising your cup of tea to your mouth is a rite. does the word “rite” seem too solemn? I use the word in order to jolt you into the realization of the life-and-death matter of awareness.
Awareness | Ceremony | Day | Death | Life | Life | Meditation | Mindfulness | Order | Reading | Scripture |
If ever man becomes proud, let him remember that a mosquito preceded him in the divine order of creation !
The doer of the favor is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.
We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
Freedom | Individual | Majority | Order |