This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.
The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.
Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |
With all its alluring promise that some one else will guarantee for a rainy day, social security can never replace the program that man's future welfare, is after all, a matter of individual responsibility.
Day | Future | Guarantee | Individual | Man | Promise | Responsibility | Security | Will | Wisdom |
Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
When we desire or solicit any thing, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
Circumstances | Desire | Good | Wisdom |
Étienne Vigée, fully Louis-Jean-Baptiste-Étienne Vigée
Want of desire is the greatest riches.
The recognition of the fragility of human life and all in it, as well as the ever-present possibility of tragedy, is essential to understanding the role of love in the meaningful life… Altruism cannot be motivated by pure reason alone. The desire to do good is rooted not in reason but in the varieties of love: the love for a partner, familial love or a kind of general love or fellow feeling for others. Without such love, all the rational reasons in the world would not motivate us to do good.
Altruism | Desire | Good | Life | Life | Love | Present | Reason | Tragedy | Understanding | World |
Forgiveness. The experience of reconciliation following upon some breach of trust, marked on the one side by the acknowledgement of wrongdoing and the desire to make amends and on the other side by the capacity to understand and the willingness to resume friendly relations.
Amends | Capacity | Desire | Experience | Forgiveness | Reconciliation | Trust | Following | Understand |
Al-Shafi’I, fully Abū ʿAbdullāh Muhammad ibn Idrīs al-Shafiʿī NULL
Never do I argue with a; man with a desire to hear him say what is wrong, or to expose him and win a victory over him… Whenever I face an opponent in debate I silently pray, “O Lord, Help him so that truth may flow from his heart and on his tongue, and so that if truth is on my side, he may follow me; and if it be on his side, I may follow him.”
Grace Helen Yerbury, fully Grace Helen Davies Yerbury
If man's religion is of any importance, it is not just a garment of expression of unity with and security in the professed beliefs of a special group. It is rather an attitude of respect for himself, his God, his fellowman, which underwrites all his activity, which is allowed freedom of expression within the limitations of that respect.
Freedom | God | Man | Religion | Respect | Security | Unity | Wisdom | Respect |
All things, by desiring their own perfection, desire God Himself; inasmuch as the perfection of all things are so many similitudes of the divine essence.
Desire | God | Perfection | God |
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by the minorities.
Security |