This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Why have they never studied or questioned the necessity or the justice of the sanitation laws that have been used to destroy such markets?
Silence |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Cancer is a curious thing... Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it's like some hidden assassin, waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire.
Body | Death | Man | Memory | Mind | Mourning | Silence | Words | Happiness |
You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.
Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |
That other one wanted to think his way to life, sure that the ultimate poem was the mind, or of the mind, or of the mind in these Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind; half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky, half desire for indifference about the sky.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
The country habit has me by the heart, for he's bewitched forever who has seen, not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun, as each man knows the life that fits him best, the shape it makes in his soul, the tune, the tone, and after ranging on a tentative flight stoops like the merlin to the constant lure.
Silence |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute
A tender, loving concern for all living creatures will need to arise and reign in our hearts if any of us is to survive. And our lives will be truly blessed only when the misery of one is genuinely felt to be the misery of all. The force of love is the force of total revolution. It is the unreleased force, unknown and unexplored as a dynamic for change.
I am a simple person, a human being who has loved life and who has seen life as divinity itself. I have lived in love with life, madly in love with the human expression of life as divinity!
Silence |
The thoughts cannot be suppressed nor can they be thrown away anywhere, you can only watch them, not naming them as good or bad. Then you are free from the roles of an experiencer and an actor, you enter into the state of an observer of non-reactional attention.
Awareness | Learning | Mind | Observation | Self-reliance | Silence | Awareness |
Generally we waste energy in unessential secondary things. This criminal waste leaves us tired and troubled at the end of the day. An overtired and emotionally disturbed person cannot sleep profoundly. The sacred night is wasted and you begin the next day with a sluggish body and a lethargic mind.
Most of us are not aware of our motivations for living or our priorities for action. We drift with the tides of societal fashions, floating in and out of social concerns at the whim of societal dictates and on the basis of images created by the media or superficial, personal desires to be helpful, useful persons. We are used to living at the surface, afraid of the depths, and therefore our actions and concerns about humanity are shallow, fragile vessels easily damaged. Ultimately most of us are concerned chiefly with our small lives, our collection of sensual pleasures, our personal salvation, and our anxiety about sickness and death, rather than the misery created by collective indifference and callousness.
Perfection | Silence | Understanding | Understand |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The tolerance of all religions is a law of nature, stamped on the hearts of all men.
Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life.
Absence | Body | Existence | Illusion | Knowledge | Past | Silence | Thought | Thought |
Viewing the world as a large pieced-together collection of fragments, some of which are labeled as friend and others as foe, begins internally. We map out our internal territories with the same positive or negative designations as we do external territories, and wars go on there as they do in the world. Internally, we are divided against ourselves; the emotions want one thing, the intellect another, the impulses of the body yet another, and a conflict takes place which is no different in quality, although it is in scale, from that of the world wars. If we are not related to ourselves in wholeness, is it any surprise that we cannot perceive the wholeness of the world? If we believe ourselves each to be a patched-together, unmatched assortment of desirable and undesirable features, motives at odds with each other, undigested beliefs and prejudices, fears, and insecurities, will we not project all this on the world?
Care | Individual | Meditation | Problems | Responsibility | Will | Happiness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Ramsey, who had been sitting loosely, folded her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.