This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone.
Who would have guessed that, thanks to all the ingenious tie-ins between advertising, entertainment, the popular arts, and the great corporations, the time would come when one of the most obvious aspects of the condition of the average American man is simply this: Most of the news he hears, most of the music he listens to, and most of the drama he witnesses - in fact almost all the intellectual or artistic experience he ever has - is provided by medicine shows.
Advertising | Entertainment | Experience | Man | Music | News | Time |
As the greatest single social influence during the formative years, schools have been the instruments of our greatest denial, unconsciousness, conformity, and broken connections. Just as allopathic medicine treats symptoms without concern for the whole system, schools break knowledge and experience into “subjects,” relentlessly turning wholes into parts, flowers into petals, history into events, without ever restoring continuity... Worse yet, not only the mind is broken, but too often, so is the spirit. Allopathic teaching produces the equivalent of iatrogenic, or doctor-caused” illness - teacher-caused learning disabilities. We might call these pedogenic illnesses. The child who may have come to school intact, with the budding courage to risk and explore, finds stress enough to permanently diminish that adventure.
Adventure | Conformity | Courage | Enough | Events | Experience | History | Influence | Knowledge | Learning | Mind | Risk | Spirit | System | Unconsciousness | Child |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
The true medicine of the mind is philosophy.
Mind | Philosophy |
I am told that nothing that we do on earth, and nothing that we make on earth, is in as great abundance as force. We now have 30,000 pounds of destructive force, TNT equivalent, available for every human being on earth. We don't have 30,000 pounds of food or medicine or art or books or any of the things that ennoble life, but we have 30,000 pounds of instant force for every human being on earth.
Abundance | Art | Books | Earth | Force | Life | Life | Nothing | Art |
Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
Resist beginnings: it is too late to employ medicine when the evil has grown strong by inveterate habit.
Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
The art of medicine is a question of timeliness.
Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing.
Consequences | Diet | Disease | Disobedience | God | Inevitable | Intemperance | Men | Respect | Struggle | Thought | Time | Work | Wrong | Respect |
Most illnesses do not, as is generally thought, come like a bolt out of the blue. The ground is prepared for years, through faulty diet, intemperance, overwork, and moral conflicts, slowly eroding the subject’s vitality. And when at last the illness suddenly shows itself, it would be a most superficial medicine which treated it without going back to its remote causes, to all that I call “personal problems.” There are personal problems in every life. There are secret tragedies in every heart. “Man does not die,” a doctor has remarked. “He kills himself”... Every act of physical, psychological, or moral disobedience of God’s purpose is an act of wrong living and has its inevitable consequences.
Consequences | Diet | Disobedience | God | Heart | Inevitable | Intemperance | Life | Life | Man | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Wrong |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Religious life is not threatened merely by vexing restrictions. It can also be threatened by the spread of false values - such as hedonism, power-seeking, greed - which are making headway in various countries and which in practice stifle the spiritual aspirations of large numbers of people.
Addictive spirituality creates dependence in the practitioner (frequently to authoritarian leaders and their communities), an avoidance of personal responsibility, and loss of individuality through social controls, such as fear, guilt, or greed for power or bliss. It also tends to suppress rational inquiry into the teachings. Healthy spirituality, on the other hand, supports the practitioner's freedom, autonomy, self-esteem, and social responsibility. It is based on experience, rather than belief or dogma; it does not create idols out of spiritual teachers; and it empowers students by emphasizing democratic forms of learning and teaching, rather than the authoritarian model that has dominated spiritual life for millennia.
Belief | Dependence | Dogma | Esteem | Experience | Fear | Freedom | Greed | Guilt | Individuality | Inquiry | Learning | Life | Life | Model | Power | Responsibility | Self | Self-esteem | Spirituality | Loss |
William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy, that gives indolence of body with an equality of mind; the best guardian of youth and support of old age; the precept of reason as well as religion, and physician of the soul as well as the body; the tutelary goddess of health and universal medicine of life.
Age | Body | Envy | Equality | Fortune | Health | Indolence | Life | Life | Mind | Old age | Precept | Pride | Reason | Religion | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Youth | Youth | Old |
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes fo mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and yo have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Regimen is better than physic. Every one should be his own physician. We ought to assist, and not to force nature. Eat with moderation what agrees with your constitution. Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. With medicine can procure digestion? Exercise. What will recruit strength? Sleep. What will alleviate incurable evils? Patience.
Better | Body | Force | Good | Moderation | Nature | Nothing | Patience | Strength | Will | Moderation |