This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Voluntary simplicity keeps me mindful of what is important, of an ecology of mind and body and world in which everything is interconnected and every choice has far-reaching consequences. You don’t get to control it at all. But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of deepest freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more.
Body | Choice | Consequences | Control | Freedom | Important | Life | Life | Mind | Simplicity | World |
The body is a thing, the soul is also a thing; man is not a thing, but a drama - his life. Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance. And the first thing he has to do is decide what he is going to do.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man... If anyone in a discussion with us is not concerned with adjusting himself to truth, if he has no wish to find the truth, he is intellectually a barbarian. That, in fact, is the position of the mass-man when he speaks, lectures or writes... The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Discussion | Luxury | Man | Platitudes | Position | Truth | Wonder |
Contentment produces, in some measure, all those effects the alchemist ascribes to what he calls the philosopher's stone; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire of them. If it cannot remove the disquietudes arising from a man's mind, body or fortune, it makes him easy under them.
Body | Contentment | Desire | Fortune | Man | Mind | Riches |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
If find, by experience, that the mind and the body are more than married, for they are most intimately united; and when the one suffers, the other sympathizes.
Body | Experience | Mind |
O soul! life is a darkness which ends as in the sunburst of day. The yearning of my heart tells me there is peace in the grave. O soul! if some fool tell you the soul perishes like the body and that which dies never returns, tell him the flower perishes but the seed remains and lies before us as the secret of life everlasting.
Body | Darkness | Day | Ends | Grave | Heart | Life | Life | Peace | Soul |
The soul is an embryo in the body of man, and the day of death is the day of awakening, for it is the great era of labour and the rich hour of creation... Death is an ending to the son of the earth, but to the soul it is the start, the triumph of life... Death removes but the touch, and not the awareness of all good. And he who has lived one spring or more possesses the spiritual life of one who has lived a score of springs.
Awakening | Awareness | Body | Day | Death | Earth | Era | Good | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Awareness |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
You cannot eradicate disease from the human body unless you eradicate it from the body politic.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
When brain and heart frequencies entrain, they enter a synchronous, resonant, or coherent wave pattern. Though rare in adults, such entrainment is critical to full development of our human nature… The same entrainment of heart frequencies occurs between mother and infant during breast-feeding and other close body contact.
Body | Heart | Human nature | Mother | Nature |
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten - that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
All hormonal function, including that of the immune system and even allergic responses, occur as a sophisticated memory system handled primarily by our emotional brain. Because learning and memory are emotional-cognitive functions, the neural pattern, imprint, or “structure of knowledge” (to use Piaget’s term) of specific learning events includes in its content the memory patterns of those emotional hormones prominent in the body at the time of that learning.
Body | Events | Knowledge | Learning | Memory | System | Time |
Love joins our present with the past and the future... Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods... Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from voiceless valleys... Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquillity of the soul in the depth of Eternity... And so, all who passed spoke of Love as the image of their hopes and frustrations, leaving it a mystery as before.
Body | Desire | Eternity | Existence | Future | Grave | Heart | Knowledge | Love | Men | Mystery | Past | Present | Quiet | Rest | Soul | Tranquility |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
A room without books is a body without a soul.