This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
Adolescence | Enough | Suffering |
Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too much, we no longer imagine; and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless.
Death | Imagination | Suffering |
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.
You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.
From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone — an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.
Capacity | Danger | Dependence | Illusion | Individual | Insanity | Power | Suffering | Will | Danger |
Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.
Detachment | Suffering |
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
The seal of suffering impressed upon our destiny announces in clear characters our high calling.
As long as you have attachment to the body and attachment to objects, fear and suffering will be with you. Therefore, Krishna told Arjuna to develop his discrimination and rid himself of body consciousness. He told him that once he was free of body consciousness he would be able to develop integral vision. Embodiments of Love, Mankind today has three types of vision. The first is body oriented vision, which is totally superficial. When you have this kind of vision you see only the external appearance of others, such as the clothes and the ornaments they wear, their facial features, their body characteristics, their peculiarities of speech, etc. This type of vision is oriented only towards the phenomenal world. The second kind of vision is insightful vision.
Appearance | Body | Consciousness | Fear | Mankind | Suffering | Vision | Will |
Likewise, looking deep within the mind, in the very most interior part of the self, when the mind becomes very, very quite, and one listens very carefully, in that infinite silence, the soul begins to whisper, and its feather-soft voice takes one far beyond what the mind could ever imagine, beyond anything rationality could possibly tolerate, beyond anything logic can endure. In its gentle whisperings, there are the faintest hints of infinite love, glimmers of a life that time forgot, flashes of a bliss that must not be mentioned, an infinite intersection where the mysteries of eternity breathe life into mortal time, where suffering and pain have forgotten how to pronounce their own names, this secret quiet intersection of time and the very timeless, an intersection called the soul.
Eternity | Life | Life | Logic | Mind | Mortal | Pain | Quiet | Rationality | Soul | Suffering | Time |
My existence is such that "I" do not really exist. At the end of understanding so much I understand that I know nothing. I suffer for being surrounded by intense suffering and yet I'm deeply suspicious if first of all there is indeed any consciousness except me. I strive to find the artist who might have fathered this great universal art but feel myself to be too feeble to accomplish this seemingly unattainable mission. Yet I have every respect for life, and it is this sheer respect that makes me live.
Art | Consciousness | Existence | Respect | Suffering | Understanding | Respect | Art | Understand |
"Throughout history, religion has been the single greatest source of human-caused wars, suffering, and misery. In the name of God, more suffering has been inflicted than by any other manmade cause." I was, of course, using the word "religion" in its sociological meaning, as any belief invested with "ultimate concern," in which case not only Islam, Christianity, and Shintoism are religions, but Marxism, Nazism, and Eco-terrorism are all versions of religions or religiously held beliefs. Seen as such, the opening sentence is obviously true.
The state is suffering from two opposite vices, avarice and luxury; two plagues which, in the past, have been the ruin of every great empire.
Nature ever upbuilds one thing from other, suffering naught To come to birth but through some other's death.
The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives. A spiritual life allows us to move beyond the ego into something more universal. Religious experience carries us outside of clock time into eternal time. We open ourselves into something more complete and beautiful. This bigger vista is perhaps the most magnificent aspect of a religious experience. There is a sense in which Karl Marx was correct when he said that religion is the opiate of the people. However, he was wrong to scoff at this. Religion can give us skills for climbing up on onto a ledge above our suffering and looking down at it with a kind and open mind. This helps us calm down and connect to all of the world's sufferers. Since the beginning of human time, we have yearned for peace in the face of death, loss, anger and fear. In fact, it is often trauma that turns us toward the sacred, and it is the sacred that saves us.
Anger | Beginning | Ego | Eternal | Experience | Life | Life | Peace | Religion | Sacred | Sense | Suffering | Time | Wrong |
The categorical imperative holds up a “universal natural law,” the law of human society, as a standard of comparison to this [bourgeois] natural law of individuals. This would be meaningless if particular interests and the needs of the general public intersected not just haphazardly but of necessity. That this does not occur, however, is the inadequacy of the bourgeois economic form: there exists no rational connection between the free competition of individuals as what mediates and the existence of the entire society as what is mediated...This irrationality expresses itself in the suffering of the majority of human beings...This problem, which only society itself could rationally solve through the systematic incorporation of each member into a consciously directed labor process, manifests itself in the bourgeois epoch as a conflict in the inner life of its subjects.
Competition | Existence | Labor | Law | Life | Life | Majority | Public | Society | Suffering | Society |