This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If you want to find out how well you are living up to your spiritual values and higher principles, pay close attention to how you behave in the middle of an argument or a tense moment involving someone you live with, work with, or are in love with.
Argument | Attention | Love | Principles | Work |
At particular epochs of their life, [children] reveal an intense and extraordinary interest in certain objects and exercises, which one might look for in vain at a later age… Such attention is not the results of mere curiosity; it is more like a burning passion. A keen emotion first rises from the depths of the unconscious, and sets in motion a marvelous creative activity in contact with the outside world, thus building up consciousness.
Age | Attention | Children | Consciousness | Curiosity | Life | Life | Passion | World |
Rather than attend to those things we love, we give the bulk of our attention instead to things that bring us harm.
Gratefulness arises naturally from this fertile balance of honoring both our sorrow and our joy. We name our sorrows so that we can bring care and attention to our wounds, so that we may heal. And at the same time we give thanks for the innumerable gifts and blessings bestowed upon us daily, lest we forget how rich we are.
Attention | Balance | Blessings | Care | Joy | Sorrow | Time |
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power.
Achievement | Attention | Circumstances | Destroy | Genius | Little | Mediocrity | Men | Nature | Power | Prison | Sense |
Marie Henri Beyle, better known by pen name Stendhal
One can acquire everything in solitude - except character.
As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
Many people live as if life were a dress rehearsal for some later date. It isn't. In fact, no one has a guarantee that he or she will be here tomorrow. Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over. When our attention is in the present moment, we push fear from our minds.
Attention | Control | Fear | Guarantee | Life | Life | People | Present | Time | Tomorrow | Will |
It is erroneously believed that attention is attracted out of interest; actually our interests are more often determined by our own inner state, and we stay interested because we have learned to place our attention.
Ultimately, what leads to wise choices is love—the attention to others as ends in themselves, as I am an end in myself, not a means to an end. The way love is implemented and practiced is care, which is attending to the true needs of others. So wise choices come about through care.
Robert J. Shiller, fully Robert James "Bob" Shiller
The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.
Ability | Attention | Focus | Important | Intelligence |
André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important.
Desire not to change a man into something other than he is. For it is certain that good reasons, against which you can do nothing, constrain him to be thus and not otherwise. But you can impart a change to that which is already; for a man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you. And to limn its outline, so that it is evident to all, and to the man himself. Then, once he perceives it, he will accept it (having readily enough accepted it the day before) even though he has no special ardor to second him therein. And likewise once, by dint of having fixed his attention on it, it has been integrated within him, and indeed become a second nature, it will live the life of all things which seek to perpetuate and augment themselves.
Attention | Change | Day | Desire | Enough | Good | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | Will |
Love is the doorway thru which the human soul passes from selfishness to service and from solitude to kinship with all mankind.