This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit; and our wandering thoughts in prayer are but the neglects of meditation and recessions from that duty; according as we neglect meditation, so are our prayers imperfect, meditation being the soul of prayer and the intention of our spirit.
Duty | Intention | Language | Meditation | Neglect | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Wisdom |
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
The most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The most important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence and it marks the difference between a man of sense and a fool.
American Federation of Labor NULL
When opportunities for profit diminish, opportunities for jobs likewise disappear.
The best and the deepest moral training is that which one gets by having to enter into proper relationships with others… Present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.
In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal… To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the “others,” of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion.
Consciousness | Existence | Humanity | Money | People | Power |
We are at ease with a moral judgment made against someone’s private sin - lust or greed. We are much less comfortable judging someone’s public ethic - those decisions that can lead to such outcomes as aggression, the abuse of the environment, the neglect of the needy.
Abuse | Aggression | Greed | Judgment | Lust | Neglect | Public | Sin |
The tragedy of our time is “the treason of the clerks,” that is, the failure of our best minds to give themselves to contemplation of truth, and their undue preoccupation with immediate problems to the neglect of the deeper problems.
Contemplation | Failure | Neglect | Problems | Time | Tragedy | Treason | Truth | Failure | Contemplation |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
Banish wisdom, throw away knowledge, and the people will benefit a hundredfold! Banish “humanity,” throw away righteousness, and the people will become conscientious and full of love! Banish skill, throw away profit and thieves and robbers will disappear!
Humanity | Knowledge | Love | People | Righteousness | Skill | Will | Wisdom |
The historical Jesus has a different category of sins from that of the Old Testament or of Paul or of ecclesiastical writers after him. The sins which occupied the attention of Jesus were hypocrisy, wordliness, intolerance, and selfishness. The sins which occupy the principal attention of the Church… are impurity, murder, the drinking of alcohol, swearing, the neglect of the Church’s services and ordinances.
Attention | Church | Hypocrisy | Intolerance | Murder | Neglect | Selfishness | Old Testament | Old |
A winner is big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
Enough |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the older order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
Experience | Fear | Incredulity | Mankind | Nothing | Order | Success |
That cold, still statistic of profit and loss is a statement about someone’s happiness and someone else’s pain.
Sa’ib of Tabriz, aka Mirza Muhammad Ali Sa'ib, Saib Isfahani or Sa'ib Of Esfahan NULL
What does it profit you that all the libraries of the world should be yours? Not knowledge but what one does with knowledge is your profit.
Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle
Doing is never enough if you neglect Being.
To get profit without risk, experience without danger, and reward without work, is as impossible as it is to live without being born.
Danger | Experience | Reward | Risk | Work |
Beyond the logic concerned with things, education must provide the possibility of awakening and cultivating moral aesthetic intuitions. It is the neglect of these higher values that has reduced life to a mere struggle for existence and to the detriment of social and human values in economic and political life.
Aesthetic | Awakening | Education | Existence | Life | Life | Logic | Neglect | Struggle |
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind. As for any other freedom it is but a mockery and a delusion, for however free you may think yourself, you have to use the door when you go out of the room, nor are you free to make yourself young at will or to profit by the sun at night... Not-being is not freedom.