This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Meridel Le Sueur, born Meridel Wharton
What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone.... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a future. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to "negotiate" between this hunger and this greed.
Body | Government | Hunger | Labor | Meaning | Organization | Government | Crisis |
One of the many contradictions which 'after-lifers' can not resolve is that 'the spirit rises out of the body leaving the brain behind, but somehow still incorporating neuronal functions such as sight, hearing, and proprioception.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
You are infinite. You are really everywhere. But you think that you are the body, and therefore consider yourself limited. If you think you are the body which is sitting, you do not know your true nature.
Michael Jackson, fully Michael Joseph Jackson, aka MJ or King of Pop
In the end, the most important thing is to be true to yourself and those you love and work hard. Work like there's no tomorrow. Train. Strive. Really train and cultivate your talent to the highest degree. Be the best at what you do. Get to know more about your field than anybody alive. Use the tools of your trade, if it's books or a floor to dance on or a body of water to swim in. Whatever it is, it's yours. That's what I've always tried to remember.
Michael Jordan, fully Michael Jeffrey Jordon, aka MJ, Air Jordan and His Airness
My body could stand the crutches but my mind couldn’t stand the sideline.
There is no process of evolution in which duration introduces new events of itself and at its own insistence; time is integrated as a nosological constant, not as an organic variable. The time of the body does not affect, and still less determines, the time of the disease.
Before Descartes, and long after his influence as philosopher and physiologist had diminished, passion continued to be the meeting ground of body and soul; the point where the latter's activity makes contact with the former's passivity, each being a limit imposed upon the other and the locus of their communication.
Mike Ditka, fully Michael Keller Ditka, Jr., aka "Iron" Mike Ditka
Here's what I tell anybody and this is what I believe. The greatest gift we have is the gift of life. We understand that. That comes from our Creator. We're given a body. Now you may not like it, but you can maximize that body the best it can be maximized.
Body | Understand |
If the passions are possible only in a being which has a body, and a body not entirely subject to the light of its mind and to the immediate transparence of its will, this is true insofar as, in ourselves and without ourselves, and generally in spite of ourselves, the mind's movements obey a mechanical structure which is that of the movement of spirits.
But then, what is philosophy today - philosophical activity, I mean - if it is not the critical work of thought on itself? And if it does not consist in the endeavour of knowing how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, rather than legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it presumes to give them naively positivistic instruction. But it is its right to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The "essay" - which should be understood as the test by means of which one modifies oneself through the play of truth and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication - is the living body of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an "ascesis", an exercise of the self, in thought.
Body | Knowing | Knowledge | Means | Philosophy | Play | Practice | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Thought | Truth | Work | Think | Thought |
There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect… What is philosophy today… if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?… The ‘essay’ —which must be understood as a transforming test of oneself in the play of truth and not as a simplifying appropriation of someone else for the purpose of communication—is the living body of philosophy, if, at least, philosophy is today still what it was once, that is to say, an askesis, an exercise of the self, in thought.
Body | Indispensable | Knowing | Life | Life | Philosophy | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Truth | Think |
Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
There is in me a principle which thinks, wills and feels... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will and feel. And I — the I that thinks, wills and feels — am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills and feels.
Body | Consciousness | Truth | Will | Wills |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.
Body | Effort | Experience | Mind |
By power… I do not understand a general system of domination exercised by one element or one group over another, whose effects… traverse the entire body social… It seems to me that first what needs to be understood is the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent to the domain wherein they are exercised, and that are constitutive of its organization; the game that through incessant struggle and confrontation transforms them, reinforces them, inverts them; the supports these relations of force find in each other, so as to form a chain or system, or, on the other hand, the gaps, the contradictions that isolate them from each other; in the end, the strategies in which they take effect, and whose general pattern or institutional crystallization is embodied in the mechanisms of the state, in the formulation of the law, in social hegemonies. The condition of possibility of power… should not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique space of sovereignty whence would radiate derivative and descendent forms; it is the moving base of relations of force that incessantly induce, by their inequality, states of power, but always local and unstable. Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.
Body | Existence | Force | Omnipresence | Power | Space | Struggle | System | Unique | Understand |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The stock of money, prices and output was decidedly more unstable after the establishment of the Reserve System than before. The most dramatic period of instability in output was, of course, the period between the two wars, which includes the severe (monetary) contractions of 1920-1, 1929-33, and 1937-8. No other 20 year period in American history contains as many as three such severe contractions. This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System and that the severity of each of the major contractions—1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities. Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, so that mistakes—excusable or not—can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic—this is the key political argument against an independent central bank. To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers.
Argument | Body | Discretion | Evidence | Freedom | History | Instability | Men | Money | Power | Price | Reserve | System | War | World |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
In both social and natural sciences, the body of positive knowledge grows by the failure of a tentative hypothesis to predict phenomena the hypothesis professes to explain; by the patching up of that hypothesis until someone suggests a new hypothesis that more elegantly or simply embodies the troublesome phenomena, and so on ad infinitum. In both, experiment is sometimes possible, sometimes not (witness meteorology). In both, no experiment is ever completely controlled, and experience often offers evidence that is the equivalent of controlled experiment. In both, there is no way to have a self-contained closed system or to avoid interaction between the observer and the observed. The Gödel theorem in mathematics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, the self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecy in the social sciences all exemplify these limitations.
Body | Evidence | Experience | Experiment | Failure | Hypothesis | Knowledge | Phenomena | Prophecy | System | Uncertainty | Failure |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Of escape there are but three methods — two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.
Body |
Milarepa, fully Jetsun Milarepa NULL
A free and resourceful and fully equipped human body that's freed of the eight unfree states is not easy to get. To get to the heart of this free and resourceful occasion and to get past the pleasures of life is not easy to do. To see what is wrong with the phenomenon of samsara and accomplish nirvana is not something easy to do. Although one might practice true dharma extensively the purest conductive conditions don't easily join. A lama who masters instructions and scriptures and logic and has a compassionate heart is not easy to find. A student with faith who does not get fed up or exhausted and is able to actually practice is not easy to find. A practice environment blessed with the proper conditions free of all hazard and fear is not easy to find. Friends with the same motivation and way to apply it who’s thinking accords with your own are not easy to find A body that's able to work with its pain and illness and to do all you bid it is not something easy to find. Although you might get every one of these factors together to practice with one-pointed mind is not easy to do. These are nine things which are difficult to come by. They're difficult, but it's these difficult things you must do.
Body | Faith | Fear | Hazard | Heart | Life | Life | Mind | Pain | Past | Practice | Thinking | Work | Wrong | Blessed |