This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert Aitken, fully Robert Baker Aitken
The Buddha and all his successors warn us against intellectual structures that confine us to an artificial environment, and against concepts that smear over the living fact of things in themselves. Even the idea of the Buddha must be forgotten.
I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.
Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach
In this world within, your world, you are the most important figure. There is a place that no one else can fill There is an influence that no one else can impart. There is a life that no one else can live quite as well as you can live it. What you do with your life within, in terms of self-realization, self-awareness, self-denial and self-expression, is the greatest challenge that can come to you.
Awareness | Challenge | Important | Influence | Life | Life | Self | Self-awareness | Self-denial | Self-realization | World |
Ashoka or Ashoka the Great NULL
One should honour another man’s sect, for by doing so one increases the influence of one’s own sect and benefits that of the other man.
There is a dialectical relation between one’s life and one’s work. The former obviously influences the latter, but one’s work also becomes an influence on one’s life. It is atwo way affair, a mysterious process where what we call life and what we call creation merge, and do not merge, cross feed each other.
J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown
Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist is likely to find that his suggestions have fallen on fertile soil so long as he delivers his message with an eye to the existing attitudes and intellectual level of his audience.
The mystic vision of God, or ecstasy of felt union with Him, is, to those who attain it, an affair of ravishing emotional intensity, of vivid intellectual illumination, and on both of these counts of supreme value.
One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about.
The most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts.
J. A. C. Brown, fully James Alexander Campbell Brown
Communism and Fascism or Nazism although poles apart in their intellectual content are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.
Authority | Personality | Pleasure |
Materialism assumes a line of `continuity’ running through the whole scheme of nature, despite its obvious gaps; on the contrary, he underlines the significance of `discontinuity’ as positive evidence of the intervention of a higher source of influence which escapes man’s limited `scale of observation.’ A giant or a microbe would, with similar intelligence, observe the same phenomenon differently; they might be guided by their scales of observation to different, or at least, to modified conclusions. There is no scientific truth in an absolute sense. The phrase Ad veritatem per scientiam is an absurdity.
Absolute | Evidence | Influence | Intelligence | Man | Materialism | Nature | Observation | Sense | Truth |
Leonard W. Doob, fully Leonard William Doob
For Goebbels, anxiety was a double-edged sword: too much anxiety could produce panic and demoralization, too little could lead to complacency and inactivity. An attempt was constantly made, therefore, to achieve a balance between the two extremes.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Balance | Complacency | Inactivity | Little | Panic |
How well people manage their emotions determines how effectively they can use their intellectual ability.