This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pāli Canon or Tipitaka or Pāli Tipitaka
First of all there will appear to you, swifter than lightning, the luminous splendor of the colorless light of Emptiness, and that will surround you on all sides. ...Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to your illusory ego.
There is no misunderstanding about the scholar-offenses under the larger of the growing belief that they are individuals who are cold, hard, and without life.
Belief |
Darwinism is a testable scientific theory. Intelligent design is a belief system.
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Rationalism ... is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God.
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
By now many intellectuals regard theoretical or 'objective' knowledge as the only knowledge worth considering. Popper himself encourages the belief by his slander of relativism. Now this conceit would have substance if scientists and philosophers looking for universal and objective morality had succeeded in finding the former and persuaded, rather than forced, dissenting cultures to adopt the latter. This is not the case.
Belief | Knowledge | Morality | Regard | Slander | Worth | Theoretical | Slander |
Supporters of corporate-led globalization want to impose their market-based rules and precepts on the entire planet, regardless of place, history, or culture, in the belief that economic growth is an unalloyed good, and that it is best accomplished with the minimization or elimination of interference from government.
We are always trying to convert people to a belief in our own explanation of the universe. We think that the more people there are who believe as we do the more certain it will be that what we believe is the truth. But it doesn't work that way at all… We are entering a new world in which we can choose to follow our own steps, not those that society forces us to take… We are not the person other people wish we were. We are who we decide to be. It's always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility… We are responsible for the entire world, because we did not know where there are fellow souls, we have these at the beginning of the universe, and if their lives were fine, we will be happy… We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity… We can only understand the miracle of life fully when to let the unexpected to happen.
Beginning | Belief | Blame | Life | Life | Little | People | Society | Will | Work | World | Society | Think | Understand |
Percy W. Bridgman, fully Percy Williams Bridgman
Every new theory as it arises believes in the flush of youth that it has the long sought goal; it sees no limits to its applicability, and believes that at last it is the fortunate theory to achieve the 'right' answer. This was true of electron theory—perhaps some readers will remember a book called The Electrical Theory of the Universe by de Tunzelman. It is true of general relativity theory with its belief that we can formulate a mathematical scheme that will extrapolate to all past and future time and the unfathomed depths of space. It has been true of wave mechanics, with its first enthusiastic claim a brief ten years ago that no problem had successfully resisted its attack provided the attack was properly made, and now the disillusionment of age when confronted by the problems of the proton and the neutron. When will we learn that logic, mathematics, physical theory, are all only inventions for formulating in compact and manageable form what we already know, like all inventions do not achieve complete success in accomplishing what they were designed to do, much less complete success in fields beyond the scope of the original design, and that our only justification for hoping to penetrate at all into the unknown with these inventions is our past experience that sometimes we have been fortunate enough to be able to push on a short distance by acquired momentum.
Age | Belief | Disillusionment | Enough | Experience | Future | Justification | Past | Problems | Success | Time | Universe | Will | Youth | Youth | Learn |
One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.
Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it.
Belief | Business | Family | Government | People | Government | Business |
Nothing has harmed the quality of individual life in modern society more than the misbegotten belief that human suffering is driven by biological and genetic causes and can be rectified by taking drugs or undergoing electroshock therapy. ... If I wanted to ruin someone's life, I would convince the person that that biological psychiatry is right - that relationships mean nothing, that choice is impossible, and that the mechanics of a broken brain reign over our emotions and conduct. If I wanted to impair an individual's capacity to create empathetic, loving relationships, I would prescribe psychiatric drugs, all of which blunt our highest psychological and spiritual functions.
Belief | Capacity | Choice | Emotions | Individual | Life | Life | Right | Society | Suffering | Society |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
There is a big difference between having a mission statement and being truly mission-based. To be truly mission-based means that key decisions can be referred back to the mission -- our reason for being. It means that people can and should object to management edicts that they do not see as connected to the mission...In most organizations, no one would dream of challenging a management decision on the grounds that it does not serve the mission. In other words, most organizations serve those in power rather than a mission. [The mission] says rather, that the source of legitimate power in the organization is its guiding ideas...The cornerstone of a truly democratic system of governance is not voting or any other particular mechanism. It is the belief that power ultimately flows from ideas, not people. To be truly mission-based is to be democratic in this way, to make the mission more important than the boss, something that not too many corporations have yet demonstrated an ability to do.
Ability | Belief | Decision | Important | Means | Mission | Object | Organization | People | Power | Reason | System |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.
Belief | Capitalism | Creed | Equality | Freedom | Individual | Order | Progress | Society | Society |
Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
If you change the belief first, changing the action is easier.
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier. So you have a society predicated on the idea that you have to keep growing materially, and yet nobody actually believes it.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Sören Kierkegaard has another answer: human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in faith... Faith is the belief that in God the impossible is possible, that in Him time and eternity are one, that both life and death are meaningful.
Belief | Death | Eternity | Existence | Faith | God | Life | Life | Time | God |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Is it less true for that? And shall we allow our belief in the State to survive the host of prejudices we have already sacrificed for our emancipation?
Belief |
Bompu Zen, being free from any philosophic or religious content, is for anybody and everybody. It is a Zen practiced purely in the belief that it can improve both physical and mental health. Since it can almost certainly have no ill effects, anyone can undertake it, whatever religious beliefs they happen to hold or if they hold none at all. Bompu Zen is bound to eliminate sickness of a psychosomatic nature and to improve the health generally.
Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, aka Pinchas or Pinchos of Koretz
Nothing, great and small, could exist were it not for His help. We find that all the obstacles [to observing the] prohibitions, or even thoughts, are from the Almighty alone. And without His ‘help,’ I would become a meshumad [apostate]. But if you ignore this principle, you may think that you are ‘something’ and value yourself as a man of virtue [a sheiner yid]. [You say to yourself,] ‘I went away from sin and I am clean of sin.’ But the result is that G-d leaves him, for every haughty-hearted person is an abomination to G-d, and he and I cannot live [in the same place]. Then he finds himself in the grasp of his Urge and be caught in its trap and do whatever it tempts him to do. And [R. Pinhas] said that all this is because of the compassion of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His great kindness which is continuously over the soul, he is seduced in order to fail through a [small] thing in order to remind him that without the help of G-d he is worth nothing. [If] he does not remember through a small thing, he would stumble in a great thing until he comes to … [unclear] the belief in his own power … Then he must break himself very much, until he knows that he himself becomes nothing and very small, and then he becomes a vessel prepared to accept help and assistance from G-d, may He be blessed.
Belief | Compassion | Kindness | Man | Nothing | Order | Power | Sin | Virtue | Virtue | Worth | Blessed | Think | Value |