This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The whole secret of remaining young in spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthusiasm in oneself, by poetry, by contemplation, by charity, - that is, in fewer words, the maintenance of harmony in the soul. When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in its right place within us, we ourselves are in equilibrium with the whole work of God. Deep and grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and the eternal order, reason touched with emotion and a serene tenderness of heart - these surely are the foundations of wisdom.
Beauty | Enthusiasm | Eternal | Grave | Harmony | Heart | Reason | Right | Tenderness | Work | Beauty |
If one is aware, one sees how through fear one’s concept of God arose; or perhaps there was a person who had an original experience of reality or of God and communicated it to another who in his greediness made it his own, and gave impetus to the process of imitation. Awareness is the process of completeness, and introspection is incomplete. The result of introspection is morbid, painful, whereas awareness is enthusiasm and joy.
Awareness | Enthusiasm | Experience | Fear | God | Reality | God | Awareness |
In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths — both created by propaganda — will finally have solved the problem of man.
Constraint | Enthusiasm | Excellence | Good | Man | Means | Nothing | Organization | Right | Truth | Will | Excellence | Propaganda |
Judith Anderson, born Frances Margaret Anderson-Anderson, aka Dame Judith Anderson
Innovation, creativity, and enthusiasm are all linked.
Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process. Enthusiasm - from the Greek, 'filled with God' - is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself.
Energy | Enthusiasm | Life | Life | Surrender |
Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there. In some this process of enlargement is arrested at an intermediate stage, and then love turns in upon itself and becomes sour. Some have never truly loved anything but themselves - perhaps because their first outreachings were received with coldness and lack of sympathy and then love quickly turns putrid, and becomes greed, and lust, and turns even to self- disgust. Some confine their love to the narrow limits of the family, and then too love decays into sentimentality, or hardens into indifference. The couple that are wrapped up in themselves soon find the parcel uncomfortably tight; the mother who pours out her love on her child till both are smothered in a cocoon of sentiment soon tastes the bitter worm of ingratitude and ruins the very object of her love. There are few more depressing spectacles than the perennial “old grad,” who has never broken the bonds of collegiate enthusiasm or developed beyond the throaty lore of Alma Matriolatry. And the present day provides us with the awful spectacle of what an ingrown love of country can do, what fanatical hatreds and cruelties it can engender, and how again it can destroy the very object of its love.
Day | Destroy | Enthusiasm | Family | Growth | Individual | Ingratitude | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Object | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Sentiment | Sympathy | Time | Unity | Universe | Will | World | Child | Learn |
Louise Colet, born Louise Revoil
Alas! How enthusiasm decreases, as our experience increases!
Enthusiasm | Experience |
The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it: enthusiasm signifies God in us.
Enthusiasm | God | Sense | God |
Being retired means you can learn to play again. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
Enthusiasm | Means | Play | Learn |
Conscience is doubtless sufficient to conduct the coldest character into the road of virtue; but enthusiasm is to conscience what honor is to duty; there is in us a superfluity of soul, which it is sweet to consecrate to the beautiful when the good has been accomplished.
Character | Conduct | Conscience | Enthusiasm | Good | Honor |
We must learn that any person who will not accept what he knows to be truth for the very love of truth alone is very definitely undermining his mental integrity... you have not been a close observer of such men if you have not seen them shrivel, become commonplace, mean without influence, without friends, and without the enthusiasm of youth and growth, like a tree covered with fungus, the foliage deceased, the life gone out of the heart with dry rot and indelibly marked for destruction --- dead, but not yet handed over to the undertaker.
Enthusiasm | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Men | Truth | Will | Youth | Youth | Learn |
There is a part of a child's soul that has always been unknown but which must be known. With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold. This is what the adults must do who seeks the unknown factor that lies hidden in the depths of a child's soul. This is a labor in which all must share, without distinction of nation, race, or social standing since it means the bringing forth of an indispensable element for the moral progress of mankind.
Distinction | Enthusiasm | Indispensable | Labor | Means | Progress | Sacrifice | Search | Soul | Spirit |
Michael Jordan, fully Michael Jeffrey Jordon, aka MJ, Air Jordan and His Airness
I play to win, whether during practice or a real game. And I will not let anything get in the way of me and my competitive enthusiasm to win.
Enthusiasm | Play | Practice | Will |
Those who knew that the judgements of many centuries had reinforced the opinion that the Earth is placed motionless in the middle of heaven, as though at its centre, if I on the contrary asserted that the Earth moves, I hesitated for a long time whether to bring my treatise, written to demonstrate its motion, into the light of day, or whether it would not be better to follow the example of the Pythagoreans and certain others, who used to pass on the mysteries of their philosophy merely to their relatives and friends, not in writing but by personal contact, as the letter of Lysis to Hipparchus bears witness. And indeed they seem to me to have done so, not as some think from a certain jealousy of communicating their doctrines, but so that their greatest splendours, discovered by the devoted research of great men, should not be exposed to the contempt of those who either find it irksome to waste effort on anything learned, unless it is profitable, or if they are stirred by the exhortations and examples of others to a high-minded enthusiasm for philosophy, are nevertheless so dull-witted that among philosophers they are like drones among bees.
Better | Contempt | Earth | Effort | Enthusiasm | Example | Jealousy | Light | Opinion | Philosophy | Research | Time | Waste | Writing | Think |
Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
The fire of true enthusiasm is like the fires of Baku, which no water can ever quench, and which burn steadily on from night to day, and year to year, because their well-spring is eternal.
Plan your progress carefully; hour-by hour, day-by-day, month-by-month. Organized activity and maintained enthusiasm are the wellsprings of your power.
Enthusiasm | Progress |
I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected… I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm… If I don’t think about love, I will be nothing… But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here… If you really desire something, the whole universe will conspire to help you… If you must say yes, say it with an open heart. If you must say no, say it without fear… If you want to succeed at something, let your eyes open and focused thinking to realize exactly what you want.
Beauty | Cause | Desire | Enthusiasm | Nothing | Soul | Thinking | Time | Universe | Will | World | Beauty | Think | Understand |
Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes directions… Dreams mean work… Go further than you planned. Ask for the moon: you will be surprised how often you get it.
Dreams | Enthusiasm | Need | Nothing | Universe | Waiting | Will |
There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.
Enthusiasm | Melody | Tears | Tenderness |