This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
We are, I believe, at the moment in grave danger of missing the 'path to perfection'.
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make doing each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself.
Knowledge | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Research | Science | Space |
There was a time when a man was so convinced that the world was round that he was determined to prove it.
Power |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Yet is seems, large-scale organization is here to stay. Therefore it is all the more necessary to think about it and to theorize about it. The stronger the current, the greater the need for skillful navigation.
Work |
Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum
We are always in search of the redeeming formula, the crystallizing thought.
Some say that you should not want money at all because the desire for money is materialistic and not spiritual. But we want you to remember that you are here in this very physical world where Spirit has materialized. You cannot separate yourself from the aspect of yourself that is spiritual, and while you are here in these bodies, you cannot separate yourselves from that which is physical or material. All the magnificent things of a physical nature that are surrounding you are Spiritual in nature.
Individual | Power | Right | World | Wrong |
We see what we want to see, what we can tolerate seeing, and our partner does the same. Neutralizing each other's complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness. We narrow down our partner, ignoring or rejecting essential parts when they threaten the established order of our coupledom. We also reduce ourselves, jettisoning large chunks of our personalities in the name of love.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Through this intellect, every man is a person and through the same intellect he can see exactly the same truth as any other man can see, provided they both use their intellects in the proper way. Here, and nowhere else, lies the foundation for the very possibility of a philosophia perennis; for it is, not a perennial cloud floating through the ages in some metaphysical stratosphere, but the permanent possibility for each and every human being to actualize an essence through his own existence, that is to experience again the same truth in the light of his own intellect. And that truth itself is not an anonymous one. Even taken in its absolute and self-subsisting form, truth itself bears a name. Its name is God.
Music must naturally have been criticized in proportion as it improved, especially if its progress was considerable and subitaneous: for then it differs most from the sounds to which our ear is accustomed. But if we begin to be used to it, then it pleases, and it is prejudice any longer to oppose it.
Circumstances | Order | Power | Present |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
For de small stealing dey puts you in jail, soon or late. But for de big stealing dey puts yo' picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croaks! If dey's one thing I learned in ten years, listenin' to de white quality on de Pullman cars, it's dat same fact. And when I gets a chance to use it -- from stowaway to Emperor in two years. Dat's goin' some!
This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.
Aims | Art | Awareness | Experience | Individual | Meaning | Means | Mind | Nothing | Power | Practice | Present | Reflection | Spirit | Work | Art | Awareness |
The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when solutions donÂ’t work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility. We need pruning. Cut back to our roots, we learn this psalm and discover the quietness of the weaned child, the tranquility of maturing trust. It is such a minute psalm that many have overlooked it, but for all its brevity and lack of pretense, it is essential. For every Christian encounters problems of growth and difficulties of development.