This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Howard Gardner, fully Howard Earl Gardner
Now intelligence seemed quantifiable. You could measure someone's actual or potential height, and now, it seemed, you could also measure someone's actual or potential intelligence. We had one dimension of mental ability along which we could array everyone... The whole concept has to be challenged; in fact, it has to be replaced
Ability | Intelligence |
To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.
Admiration | Existence | Meaning | Morality | Science |
A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension -- seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence. This means recognizing that we both have an important part to play in helping each other become more fully who we are....A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion.
Beauty | Heart | Important | Individual | Love | Means | People | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Sacred | Soul | Beauty |
Religion is more than a creed or a doctrine, more than faith or piety; it is an everlasting fact in the universe, something that exists outside knowledge and experience, an order of being, the holy dimension of existence. It does not emanate from the affections and moods, aspirations and visions of the soul. It is not a divine force in us, a mere possibility, left to the initiative of man, something that may or may not take place, but an actuality, the inner constitution of the universe, the system of divine values involved in every being and exposed to the activity of man, the ultimate in our reality. As an absolute implication of being, as an ontological entity, not as an adorning veneer for a psychical wish or for a material want, religion cannot be totally described in psychological or sociological terms.
Absolute | Creed | Faith | Force | Initiative | Knowledge | Order | Religion | System |
There are four dimensions of religious existence, four necessary components of man’s relationships to God: (1) the teaching, the essentials of which are summarized in the form of a creed, which serve as guiding principles in our thinking about matters temporal or eternal, the dimension of the doctrine; (b) faith, inwardness, the direction of one’s heart, the intimacy of religion, the dimension of privacy; (c) the law, or the sacred act to be carried out in the sanctuary in society or at home, the dimension of the deed; (d) the context in which creed, faith, and ritual come to pass, such as the community or the covenant, history, tradition, the dimension of transcendence.
Principles | Sacred | Society | Thinking | Society |
Nothing exists for its own sake, nothing is valid by its own right. What seems to be a purpose is but a station on the road. All is set in the dimension of the holy. All is endowed with bearing on God.
Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.
Eternity | Experience | Nothing | Right | Thinking | Time | Wonder | World |
The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness.
Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.
Beauty | Experience | Mystery | Nature | People | Universe | Wonder | World | Beauty |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction. For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire that owed their inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them.
Body | Death | Desire | Inspiration | Love | Past | Power | Time | Will |
Panopticism is one of the characteristic traits of our society. It's a type of power that is applied to individuals in the form of continuous individual supervision, in the form of control, punishment and compensation, and in the form of correction, that is, the molding and transformation of individuals in terms of certain norms. This threefold aspect of panopticism - supervision, control, correction - seems to be a fundamental and characteristic dimension of the power relations that exist in our society.
Individual | Power | Punishment |
I think this serious and fundamental relation between struggle and truth, the dimension in which philosophy has developed for centuries and centuries, only dramatizes itself, becomes emaciated, and loses its meaning and effectiveness in polemics within theoretical discourse. So in all of this I will therefore propose only one imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never engage in polemics.
Meaning | Philosophy | Struggle | Will | Theoretical | Think |
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
Beauty | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Right | Wrong | Beauty |
It is above all the valorizing of the present that requires emphasizing. The simple fact of existing, of living in time, can comprise a religious dimension. This dimension is not always obvious, since sacrality is in a sense camouflaged in the immediate, in the "natural" and the everyday. The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing — even fugitively — in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant.
Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
The shape of the earth is noble and spherical, and its motion is circular, though it could be more perfect. And since in the world there is no maximum in perfections, motions and figures (as is evident from what has already been said) it is not true that this earth is the vilest and lowest [of the bodies of the world], for though it seems to be more central in relation to the world, it is also, for the same reason, nearer to the pole. Neither is this earth a proportional, or aliquot part of the world, for as the world has neither maximum, nor minimum, neither has it a moiety, nor aliquot parts, any more than a man or an animal [has them]; for the hand is not an aliquot part of the man, though its weight seems to have a proportion to the body, just as it does to the dimension and the figure. Nor is the dark colour [of the earth] an argument for its baseness, because to an observer on the sun, it [the sun] would not appear as brilliant as it does to us; indeed, the body of the sun must have a certain more central part, a quasi earth, and a certain circumferential quasi-fiery lucidity, and in the middle a quasi-watery cloud and clear air, just as this earth has its elements. Thus someone outside the region of fire would see [the earth as] a brilliant star, just as to us, who are outside the region of the sun, the sun appears very luminous.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
Religion cannot be anything other than a celebration of life. And the serious person becomes handicapped: he creates barriers. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot celebrate. The very dimension of celebration disappears from his life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert, you can go on thinking and pretending that you are religious but you are not. If your celebration comes to a peak, this shore turns to be that shore. When you are really at the peak of your celebration, when your dance is at the ultimate climax, immediately this shore is no more this shore; you are on the other shore. You are no more in the world, you are in God.
Thinking |
An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating blah. It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.
Commitment | Reflection |
In the dimension of time, consciousness is experienced as the eternal present with a strong element of teleology: It is the future that pulls rather than the past that pushes. Some traditional views of man interpret the present as determined by the past. Specifically, these views hold that present events or problems are the workings out of early programing. Maturity then becomes the resolution of childhood conflicts.... An alternative interpretation of the situation is to seek ways to outgrow, i.e., genuinely overcome, a problem.... Genuine growth is the experience of being pulled or attracted by a goal in the future (Aristotle's final cause or telos), not that of being pushed into action (Aristotle's efficient cause or aitia). And in directing our gaze to the future, we utilize whatever material from the past we deem appropriate, including the use of the past to interfere with the future. Under this analysis, the past becomes almost irrelevant in the experience and conception of the present. Men like Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle and Bertrand Russell were able to maintain joy, growth, and vigor in old age because the future and not the past was experienced as determining their present.
Action | Age | Cause | Childhood | Consciousness | Eternal | Events | Experience | Future | Growth | Man | Old age | Past | Present | Problems | Resolution | Old |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
If now we view the sociocultural universe from the standpoint of the component of its human creators, agents, users and operators, we observe that the human components of sociocultural phenomena appear also in the forms of: social system (or organized groups), social congeries (unorganized and largely nominal plurals of individuals) and intermediary semi-organized groups of individuals of various de¬grees of organization. If an interacting group of individuals has as its raison d'etre a consistent set of meanings-values-norms which satisfy their need(s) and for whose use, enjoyment, maintenance and growth the individuals are freely or coercively bound together into one collectivity with a definite and consistent set of law-norms prescribing their conduct and interrelationships, such a social group is a social system or organized group. If its central meanings-values are religious or scientific, or political, or artistic, or 'encyclopedic,' the group respectively will be a religious, scientific, political, artistic, or 'encyclopedic' social system. The nature of the meanings-values of the group determines the specific nature of the group itself." "In any real group-be it a social system or a social congeries or an intermediary type-its 'social' form of being is always inseparable from the 'cultural' meanings-values-norms. Besides the dimension of per¬sonality of its members, any real human (super-organic) group is always a two-dimensional sociocultural reality. The categories of: 'the cultural' and 'the social' are thus inseparable in the empirical sociocultural universe of man
Conduct | Growth | Nature | Phenomena | System | Universe | Will |