This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.
Reality |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task. . . . He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
Envy | Future | Love | People | Reality | Reason | Will | Work |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'
Desolation | Existence | Imagination | Important | Life | Life | Memory | Mind | Past | Poverty | Spirit | World |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
All are wicked to some extent or other. Therefore, everyone needs correction; and everyone has to be educated and guided into the right path.
Man is flying to the Moon and diving into the Sea; but he does not know how to live on Earth with his fellow men in Love and Peace. He moves towards the Moon for fear others may reach there before him and dives through the Sea to strike terror, himself terrified of others.
Appearance | Nature | Reality |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Imagination | World |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.
Doubt | Imagination |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
As you can see, arenas, an act is not, as young people often think, like a stone, someone lifts and throws, and it succeeds or fails, that's all. When you lift this rock, the earth becomes lighter and hand to bear it becomes heavier. When you fly, the circuits of the stars respond, and where hit or falls the universe is changed. With each act of compromising the overall balance. The winds and seas, the forces of water, soil and light, animals and plants, and everything they do is good and correct us make. Because all of them act in the balance. Since the hurricane and the blare of the great whales, until the dried drop one sex and the flying gnats: it's all done with a view to balance the total. But we, to the extent that we have dominion over the universe and the one over the other, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do by their nature. We must learn to maintain balance. Once you have intelligence, you should not act out of ignorance. After you have choices, you should not behave irresponsibly.
Children | Imagination |
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.
Doubt | Integration | Man | Nature | Reality | Relationship | Science | World |
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety.
Awe | Imagination | Mind | Society | Society |
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
Order | Prediction | Reality | Sound |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.
Birth | Civilization | Faith | Global | History | Human race | Race | Reality | Science |
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.
Day | Earth | Eternal | God | Heaven | History | Insight | Life | Life | Little | Love | Mind | Obedience | Openness | Prayer | Present | Psychology | Reality | Sacred | Submission | Vision | Will | Words | Work | God |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
Consequences | Contemplation | Conversation | Decision | Deliberation | Dread | Enough | Glory | Illusion | Life | Life | Men | Past | Poverty | Practice | Reality | Deliberation | Contemplation | Think |
Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren
Love between the ugly, is the most beautiful love of all.