This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Healing depends on listening with the inner ear - stopping the incessant blather, and listening.
If enough people consider compassion to be important, then the world becomes a more compassionate place.
Compassion | Enough | Important | People | World |
Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Beauty | Compassion | Nature |
We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guild or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
Beauty | Compassion | Despair | Dogma | Faith | Fear | Hope | Ignorance | Joy | Learning | Love | Optimism | Pessimism | Reason | Selfishness | Sin | Truth | Beauty |
A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternatively absorbs and expresses ideas.
Ideas | Inspiration | Listening | Man | Nothing |
People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Hate | Listening | Love | Means | People | Sound | Talking |
People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Hate | Listening | Love | Means | People | Sound | Talking |
When men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know form our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representation is not far removed from the same feeling about realities.
Anger | Change | Character | Courage | Experience | Feelings | Gentleness | Good | Habit | Listening | Melody | Men | Music | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Power | Qualities | Right | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue |
It is easier to understand a nation by listening to its music than by learning its language.
Language | Learning | Listening | Music | Understand |
Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on man’s rights; he will rather have regard for everyone, forgive everyone, help everyone as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.
Compassion | Conduct | Guarantee | Harm | Justice | Kindness | Man | Regard | Rights | Will | Forgive |